Former president also denounces polls showing him trailing Harris at one of his final rallies of campaign in Pennyslvania<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Donald Trump said with two days until the presidential election that he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot, dredging up grievances that overshadowed his attack lines against Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The closing themes of the former president\u2019s campaign at a rally in Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania brought him full circle with his 2016 campaign that went after the news media and his 2020 campaign that was defined by his attempts to overturn the result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump stayed on message for the first part of his remarks but could not resist reverting to resentments he has held on to for years, describing Democrats as demonic and lamenting about the 2020 election that polls badly and his aides thought they had convinced him to let go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,\u201d Trump said. \u201cI shouldn\u2019t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great \u2013 \u201d he said before abruptly cutting himself off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump at one point also praised himself for going-off script, a startling moment that reflects how he has become increasingly uninhibited, perhaps as the fatigue of doing multiple rallies a day has inexorably taken its toll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once Trump started on the 2020 election, he could not stop. He revived debunked conspiracy theories from 2020 and suggested anew that voting machines would be hacked, and efforts to extend polling hours in Pennsylvania \u2013 what his own team has pushed for \u2013 amounted to fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump also spent time at the rally lashing out at a series of recent polls, notably a Des Moines Register poll in Iowa that put him four points behind Harris in the state of Iowa. Harris is universally not expected to win Iowa, but it could be indicative of her momentum in the final days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou really do inflict damage, like you do with this person in Iowa,\u201d Trump said of the Selzer poll done for the Des Moines Register on Saturday. \u201cIt is called suppression. They suppress. And it actually should be illegal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Guardian has reported that Trump\u2019s aides are bullish on his chances, even though they concede they have no real idea how must-win states like Pennsylvania will break on election day. Part of the confidence is coming from internal polls that has Trump possibly winning five out of seven battlegrounds<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The trail of grievances extended to reviving an old favorite that he debuted when he was in office: castigating the news media and suggesting that he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTo get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don\u2019t mind that much, because, I don\u2019t mind. I don\u2019t mind,\u201d Trump said from behind panes of bulletproof glass, as some supporters in the crowd laughed and jeered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hours after the rally, as Trump traveled to Kinston, North Carolina, for his second of three campaign stops of the day, Trump\u2019s communications director Steven Cheung claimed in a statement that the comments were supposedly an effort to look out for the welfare of the news media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPresident Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life, including one that came within 1\/4 of an inch from killing him, something that the media constantly talks and jokes about,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPresident 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,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n