Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday night sought to re-enter a national debate dominated for more than two weeks by Vice President Kamala Harris, attacking Harris’ intelligence in an hour-long press conference and deriding her for failing to answer questions from journalists.
Throughout the event, which took place in the main hall of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump attacked the state of the U.S. economy, described the country as in mortal danger if he did not win the presidential election, and falsely described his departure from the White House – which followed his refusal to concede his election defeat in November 2020 and the violent attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters on January 6, 2021 – as a “peaceful” transfer of power.
Trump also expressed frustration when asked about the size of the crowd that gathered at Harris’s home, while boasting about the turnout at his own rally on Jan. 6, 2021. He insisted that the group of hundreds that stormed the Capitol was relatively small. But he fixated on the size of the crowd he initially gathered on the National Mall, drawing comparisons to – and declaring it to be larger than – the crowd Martin Luther King Jr. drew for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“Nobody has spoken to a larger audience than I have,” Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King when he gave his speech, his great speech, and if you look at ours – same property, same everything, same number of people, if not – we had more.”
The Trump team has been looking for ways to disrupt Harris’ advance as she rapidly consolidated the Democratic Party behind her and rose in the polls. The goal of Trump’s press conference, which he announced on his social media page Thursday morning, was to highlight that Harris has so far neither held a press conference of her own nor given an impromptu interview to the news media.
He highlighted this point during his event, arguing that she avoided it because she was “not smart enough.”
Trump stressed that he was “not complaining” about the Democratic Party’s late decision to replace President Joe Biden on the ballot – and made a litany of such complaints. He called the move to replace Biden with Harris “unconstitutional.” But when asked what section of the U.S. Constitution would prohibit such a switch on the ballot, he acknowledged that it might not actually be unconstitutional.
At the same time, he said that while the move was unfair to Biden, it had not affected his campaign. “I have not re-strategized my campaign at all,” Trump said.
When asked by a reporter how reserved he had been in public over the past few weeks, including last week, Trump replied stupidly, “What a stupid question.”
Trump is scheduled to appear in Montana on Friday to support Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, who is running against Senator Jon Tester in one of the most competitive races of the election.
“What are we doing?” Trump asked, referring to his schedule of radio interviews. Of Harris, he added: “She’s not doing a press conference.”
His wide-ranging remarks were at times rambling. Trump mused that the legal system was unfair to him, described the quick recovery of his ear after last month’s assassination attempt (“I heal quickly”) and defended the pardons he issued as president to violent felons and high-level drug traffickers when asked how they differed from his description of Harris’ time as a prosecutor in California.
Trump seemed particularly uncomfortable when asked specific questions about abortion policy – the issue he sees as the greatest political threat to Republicans. He refused to say how he would vote in Florida’s abortion referendum in November, which will determine whether voters will support a state constitutional amendment to protect and expand abortion rights.
Instead, Trump resorted to his usual evasive maneuver and said he would hold a press conference at a later date to make his position known.
When asked if he would order the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of abortion pills, he did not seem to understand the question and gave an incoherent answer that did not address the issue.
“So you can do things that are complementary, absolutely. And those things are pretty open and humane,” Trump said. “But you have to be able to vote. And I just want to give everyone a vote. And the votes are happening right now as we speak.”
Much of the press conference was dominated by familiar remarks. Trump outlined an apocalyptic vision of an America under democratic rule – and focused his attacks primarily on the economy, crime and immigration.
He also predicted that if Harris won the election, there would be a depression on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s, another reused refrain that Trump used against Biden in the 2020 election campaign.
Trump declined to elaborate on comments he made last week to a group of black journalists in which he questioned Harris’s ethnicity.
When asked how he could claim to those journalists that a woman who attended a traditionally black university had recently claimed to be black, Trump said, “Well, you have to ask her that question, because she’s the one who said it. I didn’t say it. So you have to ask her. And I appreciate that question very much, but you have to ask her.”
He added that she had been “very disrespectful” to both aspects of her heritage, her Indian mother and her Jamaican father, without explaining what that meant.
But later he tiptoed towards identity politics when describing some of its attractions.
“She is a woman,” he said. “She represents certain groups of people.”
– This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
