Trump Sticks to His Favorite Jabs at Rally in Las Vegas
"The former president meandered over 80 minutes from complaints about Tuesday’s debate to elevating baseless claims that have circulated on right-wing social media.
Former President Donald J. Trump capped off the week of his first, and possibly only, presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris with an unfocused speech at a rally in Las Vegas on Friday night, where he baselessly accused her of cheating, repeated a number of falsehoods on a wide range of topics and continued to try to stoke fear about immigration.
Over the course of an hour and 20 minutes, Mr. Trump ranted about the moderators of Tuesday’s debate, made unfounded accusations that Democrats “cheat like hell” in elections and insisted that President Biden, whom he spent years attacking as a weak president, “would have been better than” Ms. Harris.
And even as Mr. Trump continued to insist that he had been victorious in the debate — though some of his allies have acknowledged he had a rough outing — he accused Ms. Harris of wearing an earpiece in their matchup, a baseless claim that has proliferated on right-wing social media. And he said that Ms. Harris had obtained the questions in advance, an assertion for which there has been no proof.
Mr. Trump insulted his Democratic opponents, calling Ms. Harris “Kambabla,” a mispronunciation of her given name, and he called her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, “the vice president,” as he did in a speech on Thursday.
And in a bid to characterize Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz as overly liberal, he repeated false claims that he has frequently made since Ms. Harris became the Democratic nominee. Mr. Trump said Ms. Harris supported states’ taking minors from their parents to perform gender-affirming surgeries on them. No state allows such surgeries to be performed without parental consent.
And Mr. Trump once again insisted that Democrat-led states allow babies to be executed after birth. Infanticide is illegal everywhere in the country.
Mr. Trump lost Nevada, a critical battleground state, in 2016 and 2020, and he has announced policies that would benefit the state. Nevada has the highest concentration of tipped workers, and Mr. Trump has proposed ending federal income taxes on tipped wages. He has also said that, if elected, he would open up new tracts of federal land to development, with few regulations and “ultralow taxes,” in part to build more housing. A majority of Nevada is federal land.
At an event on Thursday in Arizona, Mr. Trump pledged to eliminate taxes on overtime pay, part of an effort to win the support of working- and middle-class voters.
“What, is she going to say now ‘no tax on overtime,’ too?” Lee Ward, a Las Vegas rallygoer from New York City, said, mocking the fact that Ms. Harris announced support for cutting taxes on tips after Mr. Trump had.
Many recent polls have shown Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris in a tight race in Nevada, with Democrats gaining ground since Mr. Biden exited the race and Ms. Harris became her party’s nominee. A survey conducted last month by The New York Times and Siena College found Mr. Trump up 48 percent to 47 percent over Ms. Harris. In May, he led Mr. Biden, 50 percent to 41 percent.
At one point in his rally in Las Vegas, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that Ms. Harris wanted to bring back the military draft — a position she has not taken — and to go to war with Russia, part of an effort to style himself as a foreign policy expert who could end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza with a phone call.
Yet Mr. Trump also vowed aggressive action within the country’s borders as he insisted that the United States was “under invasion” by migrants whom he likened to “an army, except in many ways, it’s more difficult because they don’t wear a uniform.” He promised to deploy federal law enforcement officials to “liberate” Aurora, Colo., a city about which he has made exaggerated claims regarding migrant crime.
“We will deploy ICE, D.H.S. and other federal officials to go in and liberate Aurora,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he would create a law enforcement task force to dismantle transnational gangs operating in the United States. “We are going to liberate parts of our country.”
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