Donald Trump delivered an hour-long rambling press conference on Thursday, telling reporters that he has no plans to recalibrate his strategy in the wake of polling upheavals and demanding debates against Harris, despite past attempts to back out of an already-set ABC News face-off.
Answering questions at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, the former president made his first public appearance since Vice President Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate on the second anniversary of a federal raid to re-capture classified documents that Trump retained after his term.
“Our country right now is in the most dangerous position it’s been in,” Trump opened in his doom-and-gloom remarks. “You could end up in a depression of the 1929 variety,” he said, adding that the country was “very close to that.”
Trump, seemingly failing to find his words, charged Walz as a “radical left– uhh– man,” later saying the Minnesota governor was “heavy into the transgender world.”
Despite a sparse rally schedule this week, Trump called the presser amid Harris’ surge in the polls. Recent counts have Harris up nationally by three points, while she took the edge in several key swing states. Asked if the momentum swing would affect his electoral strategy, Trump denied it.
“I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all, it’s the same policies,” he said, before attacking a reporter who asked why he backed off the campaign trail in recent days.
Trump shared details of a potential NBC debate on September 10, as well as debates on Sept. 25 and his hopes for a Fox debate on Sept. 4, flipping the script on the ABC debate he’d previously agreed to on the 10th. Per an ABC News statement shared by reporter Brian Stelter, Trump misspoke and was recommitting to that ABC News debate. The network now expects the former president’s attendance.
On policy questions, Trump argued that abortion has been “very much tempered down” as a campaign issue and likely wouldn’t be a top concern for voters, instead attacking Harris personally.
After defending January 6th rioters and calling their deadly attempt to keep President Joe Biden from being officially certified as the winner of the 2020 race a peaceful protest, Trump doubled down on his claim that “the presidency was taken away from Joe Biden.”
“We’re leading, I’m not complaining,” Trump said, before arguing that Democrats should have conducted a primary race instead of selecting Harris.
Elsewhere, he made the wild claim that nobody has ever spoken to crowds bigger than he has, not even Martin Luther King.
Many immediately pointed to Trump’s rambling, unfocused comments and answers as a sign of the 78-year-old’s cognitive decline, including conservative political commentator S. E. Cupp.
“Trump’s not OK,” Cupp wrote in a post to X. “Without the laugh and clap track of his rallies, his incoherent rambling seems even more unhinged, panicked, and desperate.”