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A speech billed as a roll-out of his economic plan quickly devolved into a typical litany of his grievances as former president Donald Trump addressed supporters in North Carolina on Wednesday.
Trump had only taken the stage moments earlier when he began repeating the bogus claim that he has “very good polls” coming out and attacking President Joe Biden, who is no longer running against him for a second term.
He alleged that Biden is “a very angry man” after his decision to step aside following his disastrous debate performance in June and suggested that Democrats are “a threat to democracy” because they are instead nominating Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now leading him in opinion polls of numerous swing states.
Continuing, Trump attacked Harris as “super liberal” and claimed he would win a second term this November with a “historic landslide.” He also complained about her press coverage and suggested that Democrats are only nominating her because of race.
“She was totally disrespected, the most unpopular vice president in the history of our country. And then they decided to get politically correct. We have to put her in. They put her in, and now they’re putting her on the covers of Time magazine,” he said. “Everything Kamala Harris touches turns bad. It all turns bad. San Francisco was a great city. Now it’s unlivable. California was a great state now it’s unlivable. She breaks everything, just like she broke the border. Broke our economy, but soon we are going to fix every single problem Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have created and we are going to save our country. We are going to save America.”
Trump’s remarks in North Carolina were meant to be a major policy rollout and yet another attempt at resetting his campaign after Harris has enjoyed weeks of momentum following her entrance into the race.
He acknowledged that his advisers had wanted him to deliver an “intellectual speech” on “a thing called the economy,” though he mused about that perhaps the economy “wasn’t the most important topic.”
But instead of talking about the subject he’d came to speak on, he quickly reverted to attacking the United States itself, calling the country he wants to lead “a third world nation” because he was ousted from the White House four years ago before claiming that electing him would solve all of the country’s problems.
“With four more years of Harris, your finances will never recover. The never going to recover. A country will never recover, frankly, more importantly, it will be unrecoverable. Vote Trump and your incomes will soar. Your savings will grow. Young people will be able to afford a home, and we will bring back the American dream, bigger, better and stronger than ever before,” he said.
The former president’s speech meandered between attacks on Biden and Harris and vague promises to re-implement the policies he’d put in place during his administration, and at one point he claimed the vice president is responsible for high car insurance rates and gasoline prices due to her “liberal extremism” and assailed her as an “incompetent socialist lunatic.”
“On election day, we’re going to tell her that we’ve had enough that we can’t take any more. Kamala, you’re doing a horrible job. You’re a terrible Attorney General. You are terrible District Attorney. You’re the worst vice president in history,” he said.
He then began screaming his opponent’s first name at the top of his lungs: “Kamala, Kamala, you’re fired.”
After a roughly ten-minute tangent during which he ruminated on the assassination attempt against him last month, Trump finally returned to the subject he’d ostensibly come to talk about.
He claimed that inflation, which according to the Consumer Price Index is at its’ lowest level since 2021, is “out of control” and promised a “a whole of government effort to raise the standard of living and make American life affordable,” though he did not say how he would carry any of that out.
The ex-president also again questioned Harris’s intelligence by accusing her of ducking press interviews because “she's not smart, she's not intelligent” before returning to vague platitudes on what he would do to improve economic conditions in the US.
He said a second Trump administration would “target everything from car affordability to housing affordability to insurance costs to supply chain issue,” and promised to instruct his cabinet to bring about “results with in the first 100 days,” but he again did not say how he or his administration would bring about lower prices.
In a statement, Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa noted that Trump dismissed the economy as relative unimportant because “when you’re running to slash taxes for rich donors and corporations it’s easy not to care about the working families and middle class Americans who get hurt as a result.”
“If Trump gets power, middle class taxes will go up by $2500 a year, inflation will skyrocket, and jobs will be shipped overseas,” he said.
“The choice this November is clear: Building up the middle class will be the defining goal of Vice President Harris’ presidency – that’s why she’s focused on lowering costs for working families, holding greedy corporations accountable, and creating opportunity for all Americans.”
