Former President Donald Trump spoke for over an hour in a rambling news conference on Thursday, making dozens of false and outrageous claims in an effort to wrest the spotlight away from Vice President Kamala Harris’ surging 2024 presidential campaign.
Addressing reporters at his ritzy Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, the GOP presidential nominee insisted his campaign was the one drawing large, enthusiastic crowds on the campaign trail — even though Harris’ rallies attracted tens of thousands this week — and claimed the vice president wasn’t “smart enough” to take questions from the media as he was doing.
“She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump said.
Trump also claimed he was willing to do three debates with Harris: Sept. 4 with Fox News, Sept. 10 with ABC News, and Sept. 25 with NBC News (the announcement required a clarification from Trump’s campaign regarding the host networks). Both campaigns had agreed to the Sept. 10 debate when President Joe Biden was still the presumptive nominee, but Trump canceled when Harris replaced Biden.
Harris’ campaign hasn’t said whether it’s agreed to all three dates, but Harris told reporters before boarding Air Force Two on Thursday evening that she was “looking forward” to the Sept. 10 debate, adding: “I hope he shows up.”
Harris hasn’t done a sit-down with reporters since Biden exited the race and endorsed her for the nomination. But she’s marginally improved on Biden’s position in the polls, and Democrats, at least, appear enthused to have a candidate besides the president at the top of the ticket.
“The honeymoon period is gonna end,” Trump said of Harris’ standing in the race. “She’s got a little period, the convention is coming up. [...] Everything she’s touched has turned bad.”
It was the first time Trump took questions from reporters since Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday. Trump called both Harris and Walz too liberal and dangerous to run the country.
“She picked a radical left man,” Trump said. “He’s got things done that he’s … he has positions that are just not, it’s not even possible to believe that they exist. He’s going for things that nobody’s ever even heard of, heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds having to do with safety. He doesn’t want to have borders. He doesn’t want to have walls. He doesn’t want to have any form of safety for our country.”
Trump said he wouldn’t change anything about his campaign or attacks now that he’s running against Harris. “I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all. It’s the same policies — open borders and crime. I think she’s worse than Biden,” he said.
During his press conference, which ran just short of 90 minutes, Trump compared the crowd size at the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, to the audience for Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech on the National Mall, which drew about 260,000 people.
“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” he said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not, we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.”
Trump also falsely claimed that “nobody died” during the attack on the Capitol by hundreds of his supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election he had lost. At least seven people died in connection to the riot, including several Trump supporters.
Asked why Harris was doing well in the polls, Trump said it is because “she’s a woman” who represents “certain groups of people.” He predicted her support would drop after “people find out about her.”
Trump also complained about having to face Harris in the 2024 race instead of Biden, who dropped out last month after his poor debate performance against the former president. Harris, Trump baselessly alleged, “was working with the people that wanted him out.”
Dozens of Democrats publicly called for Biden to pass the torch to a younger candidate, but there’s no evidence Harris was working behind the scenes to push out her boss.
Trump gave a head-scratcher of an answer to a question about whether he believed the Federal Drug Administration should restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone, which survived a right-wing attack before the Supreme Court earlier this year. Some conservatives want the FDA to regulate the pill out of circulation in a future GOP presidential administration.
“You could do things that would supplement. Absolutely,” Trump said. “And those things are pretty open and humane.”
He added: “ But you have to have a vote. The people are going to decide.”
Harris’ campaign responded to Trump’s press conference with sarcasm, calling it “very good” and “very normal.”
“He hasn’t campaigned all week. He isn’t going to a single swing state this week. But he sure is mad Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are getting big crowds across the battlegrounds,” the campaign said in a press release. “The facts were hard to track and harder to find in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago meltdown this afternoon.”
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