Struggling in the polls and charged with running a lackluster presidential campaign, Donald Trump faced reporters on Thursday for an hour-long press conference that swiftly descended into a familiar mess of freewheeling invective, outlandish claims and outright lies.
“Nobody was killed on January 6,” the former president and Republican presidential nominee said, of the day in 2021 when he incited an attack on Congress now linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides and the shooting by a police officer of Ashley Babbitt, who Trump voters widely claim as a martyr.
Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, Trump repeated his praise of rioters convicted and jailed in the hundreds, whom he has said he will pardon. Absurdly, he also said there was a “peaceful transfer” of power after he lost to Joe Biden.
But he seemed more exercised by the size of his audience.
“I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds,” Trump claimed, in just one complaint about the media supposedly exaggerating crowd sizes for his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, at his expense.
“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not we had more.”
Trump was comparing his speech on the Ellipse on 6 January 2021, when he told supporters to “fight like hell” in service of his lie about electoral fraud in his 2020 defeat, to King’s imperishable speech at the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963, a landmark of the civil rights era in which King outlined his dream of racial equality.
“They said I had 25,000 and he had a million people. And I’m OK with it, because I liked Dr Martin Luther King,” Trump said. It was an echo of Trump’s famous lies about the crowd size for his inauguration in 2017, compared to crowd sizes for Barack Obama. Analyses have found Trump’s crowd was not remarkable or comparable.
Trump did make news, saying he wanted to “do three debates” and had agreed or was close to agreeing terms with Fox, NBC and ABC. After he finished speaking, ABC said Harris and Trump had agreed to debate on 10 September.
But most of Trump’s answers trod familiar ground.
He accused Harris of running shy of speaking to the press; attacked her record as vice-president on border policy and immigration; ridiculed her performance in the 2020 Democratic primary; said Democrats were soft on crime; soft-pedaled the removal of the federal right to abortion by supreme court justices he installed; rehashed his hugely controversial questioning of Harris’s racial identity; claimed Harris and Biden projected weakness in the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and elsewhere, allowing Russia to invade Ukraine and Hamas to attack Israel and forfeiting the respect of authoritarian leaders; and claimed the US economy was on the brink of a “depression, not a recession” after Wall Street sell-offs but on a day of notable recovery.
That wasn’t the half of it. Trump even claimed to have been “very protective” of Hillary Clinton, the Democrat he beat in 2016, a campaign in which Trump’s supporters regularly chanted – with his encouragement – that Clinton should be locked up.
Clinton was “pretty evil”, Trump said, accusing her of various unsubstantiated misdoings, but “I thought it was a very bad thing take the wife of a president of the United States and put her in jail, and then I see the way they treat me. That’s the way it goes. But I was very protective of her. Nobody would understand that, but I was. I think my people understand it.”
Most Americans understand that Trump is the first former president to be criminally convicted, on 34 charges of falsification of business records, with sentencing due in New York on 16 September.
He faces as many as 54 other criminal charges, in cases concerning attempted election subversion and retention of classified information. On Thursday he praised as “brilliant” the Florida judge, his own appointee, who threw out the classified information case, a decision now on appeal.
Trump has also been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil suits concerning business fraud and defamation arising from a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”.
Trump has never been afraid to go low. At one point on Thursday, he said Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco whom Harris dated, “told me terrible things about her”. Given past form, including his recruitment in 2016 of women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct, Trump’s remarks seemed a likely preview of blows to come.
Despite it all, he remains the Republican nominee for president, running with JD Vance, the Ohio senator, against Harris and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota.
Amid polls showing Harris leading nationally and gaining or leading in battleground states, doubts about Trump’s prospects have spread. Earlier on Thursday, Karl Rove, a Republican operative once known as George W Bush’s “brain”, wrote for the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Trump Teeters, but Will He Fall?”
“This race will be decided by each party’s success in two fundamental tasks,” Rove wrote. “Turning out its base and persuading independent, swing voters.” Convincing independents would be “decisive”.
“The past six weeks have shown that the pendulum can swing rapidly and wildly,” Rove wrote. “The Trump campaign is floundering. Mr Trump seems rattled. He’s making plenty of unforced errors and wasting valuable, irreplaceable time on insults, side issues and trivia.”
Rove’s column was published before Trump’s press conference. Among Republicans, Rove’s message must have rung louder still after Trump was done.
“All this undermines his cause,” Rove wrote. “The Trump-Vance ticket needs to become much more disciplined and settle soon on an effective line of attack against Harris-Walz that wins over swing voters and then stick to it.
“If it can’t achieve both these goals, a race Mr Trump was on the verge of winning three weeks ago could be lost.”
