Traditionally, a campaign’s closing argument is supposed to hammer home its main themes. At a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did exactly that—by once again fantasizing about violence against his perceived enemies.
Describing how his open-air podium was mostly surrounded by bulletproof glass, the former president noted a gap in that protection, and added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” And by “fake news,” he meant the members of the press covering his rally.
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The crowd whooped and clapped. Many of Trump’s rallies feature a moment’s hate for the journalists in attendance, whom he blames for, among other things, distorting his message, not praising him enough, reflexively favoring Kamala Harris, fact-checking his statements, noticing empty seats, and reporting that people leave his events early.
But journalists are only some of the many “enemies from within” whom Trump has name-checked at his rallies and on his favored social network, Truth Social. He has suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” if Facebook’s moderation policies penalize right-wingers. He has suggested using the National Guard or the military against “radical-left lunatics” who disrupt the election. He believes people who criticize the Supreme Court “should be put in jail.” A recent post on Truth Social stated that if he wins on Tuesday, Trump would hunt down “lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who had engaged in what he called “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.” Just last week, he fantasized in public about his Republican critic Liz Cheney facing gunfire, and he previously promoted a post calling for her to face a “televised military tribunal” for treason. In all, NPR found more than 100 examples of Trump threatening to prosecute or persecute his opponents. One of his recent targets was this magazine.
Does this rhetoric matter to voters? It certainly ought to. Persecuting journalists is what autocrats do—and yet Trump’s many boosters on the right, who claim to care deeply about free speech, seem resolutely unmoved. However, his campaign has tried to clean up today’s offending remarks, something that his team rarely bothers to do. (The most recent major example was after the comedian Tony Hinchliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” while warming up the crowd at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend.)
Following today’s speech in Lititz, Team Trump is trying to spin his comments as nothing more than tender concern for the welfare of reporters. “President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, wrote in a statement. (Let’s have a moment to enjoy the self-abasement required to write that brilliantly.) He continued:
The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else. It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!
The word Orwellian is overused, but come on, Steven Cheung. You expect people to believe this crock? That jaunty final exclamation mark gives the entire statement a whiff of sarcasm, and rightly so. Trump plainly meant that, if he were targeted from a nearby rooftop, he would at least draw some small consolation if a blameless camera operator from a local TV station were taken out first.
The rest of Trump’s speech was the usual minestrone of cheap insults, petty grievances, and bizarre digressions. He repeated a claim that he’d previously made on The Joe Rogan Experience—where he said he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”—that offshore wind farms are killing whales. He suggested that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after losing the 2020 election. At times, he appeared to be boring himself, regretting that he had to deliver a stump speech that the audience had probably heard “900 times.”
He took aim at his most-hated Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “not a smart girl”; Harris was “lazy as hell”; and Adam Schiff had an “enlarged watermelon head.” He complained about “Barack Hussein Obama” and said that because Obama’s wife had criticized him, “I think we’re gonna start having a little fun with Michelle.” Notably, given his other remarks about the media, he also threatened CBS’s broadcast license because, he contended, the network had deceptively edited one of Harris’s answers in her interview with 60 Minutes. (The network denies the allegation.) For those who dismiss Trump’s threats as merely overblown rhetoric, it should be noted that he has also launched a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS in a part of Texas where the sole federal judge is a Republican.
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Trump’s current mood might be attributable to his stalled momentum in recent polls and a slump in his odds of victory in betting markets. Accordingly, in Lititz, he added a new name to his list of adversaries: J. Ann Selzer, the widely respected Iowa pollster who has a track record of producing surprising results that are borne out on Election Day. Last night, her poll for The Des Moines Register found that Harris was leading by three points in Iowa, a state that Trump won in 2020 by eight. Last year, when Selzer’s poll correctly showed Trump ahead in the state’s Republican primary campaign, he called her a “very powerful” pollster who had delivered a “big beautiful poll.” In Lititz, however, he described Selzer as “one of my enemies” and lumped her together with the media: “The polls are just as corrupt as some of the writers back there.”
The campaign is coming to an unruly close. Trump’s surrogates are going rogue: Elon Musk has said that his drive for government efficiency would cause “temporary hardship”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged this weekend to remove fluoride from drinking water; and House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Republicans would “probably” repeal the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes U.S. semiconductor production. None of these is a winning message for the Republicans. (Johnson later said he wouldn’t try to kill the bill.)
But the bigger issue is the candidate himself. The more professional elements of the campaign appear to be losing their grip on Trump, who is tired and bored and restless for revenge. Whatever happens on Tuesday, we can say authoritatively that this has been Trump’s darkest campaign yet.