Donald Trump on Thursday brushed off
calls by fellow Republicans to focus on policy matters and lay off the insults during his presidential campaign, insisting that he is “entitled” to level personal attacks on Vice President
Kamala Harris.
“I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence,” he said during a news conference at his golf club in New Jersey, the second at one of his country clubs in seven days.
The coup-attempting former president, now also a convicted felon, then claimed that he was running a “very calm campaign” and had a clear plan to win. “All we have to do is define our opponent as a communist, a socialist, someone who wants to destroy our country.”
Trump again repeated many of his favorite recent lies, replete with invented statistics. He claimed that mortgage rates had gone from 2% to 10%. In fact, they were about 3% when Trump left office and are now at 7%.
He claimed, with no evidence, that 100% of the jobs created in the last year had gone to migrants who entered the country illegally — and then clarified that the share was actually larger than 100%. He did not, however, explain how this was mathematically possible.
He repeated a claim he has used many times — with zero support — that other countries are emptying their mental hospitals by sending all their patients to the southern border of the United States. “Their population in the mental institutions is way down,” he said.
After claiming at last week’s press conference that a stock market dip was a harbinger of a coming depression, Trump took credit on Thursday for the rebound that had the Dow Jones Industrial Average end the day gaining another 555 points.
He nevertheless repeated his dire warnings about a coming depression unless he was returned to office. “We’re going to have a crash like a 1929 crash, if she gets in,” Trump said.
He offered no rationale for this claim, which he also made without providing any rationale in both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, facing different opponents.
This is the second straight week in which Trump has done almost no campaigning. The only event he had last week, apart from his hastily arranged news conference at his Mar-a-Lago country club in South Florida, was a rally for the Republican Senate candidate in Montana.
This week, he participated in a two-hour, rambling and lie-filled discussion with Elon Musk on Musk’s X platform, more commonly known by its former name, Twitter, followed two days later with an appearance in Ashville, North Carolina. His remarks there were billed as a policy speech on the economy, but Trump instead rambled on for 74 minutes with numerous personal attacks against Harris and other tangential matters.
It is unclear precisely which news outlets were permitted to attend his Thursday press conference. The Aug. 8 news conference at Mar-a-Lago was open only to handpicked reporters and outlets invited a day or two ahead of time. For Thursday, the campaign sent out a press release allowing journalists to request credentials.
HuffPost reporters were among the journalists denied credentials for the event, which featured 47 minutes of Trump rambling and lying. The question-and-answer session, which also featured a considerable number of falsehoods, lasted only 33 minutes.
When HuffPost inquired into the reason for being denied credentials, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded: “Interesting. Must be due to space restrictions…. Please try again next time. Thank you.”
Trump is facing both federal and Georgia state prosecutions for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results to remain in power despite his loss. He could be sentenced to New York state prison as early as next month following his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn actor just ahead of the 2016 election.
And he may again face federal charges for refusing to turn over classified documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving the White House. Prosecutors have appealed the decision of a Trump-appointed judge in South Florida to dismiss that indictment.
Should he win back the White House, though, Trump would almost certainly order the Department of Justice to dismiss any active federal prosecutions against him and would likely be able to postpone the state cases until after he leaves office.
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