Donald Trump warned voters at a rally in Ocala, Florida that electing Hillary Clinton in November would lead Isis to “take over this country” and reprised the claim that they were “hoping and praying” she becomes president.
Trump vowed that as president he would keep “keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country” and claimed that Clinton would not do the same.
“They’ll not only take over that part of the world,” Trump said, referring to the terror group, “they’ll take over this country, they’ll take over this part of the world.”
For the second day in a row, Trump centered his attention on the disclosures published by WikiLeaks from the hacked email account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. He accused the Justice Department of colluding with Clinton over the investigation into her use of a private email server while secretary of state.
“This is crime at the highest level. She shouldn’t be allowed to run for president,” Trump said in an hourlong attack against Clinton, again promising to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her.
The claim stems from an email exchange that references a conversation between Brian Fallon, a campaign spokesman, then a staffer at the DoJ. The conversation took place two months before the FBI opened an investigation into Clinton’s email server and pertains to publicly available information about a lawsuit involving a Foia request.
The Clinton campaign has said the emails were hacked by Russian intelligence officers in an effort to sway the election. The campaign has not verified the authenticity of the emails.
But Trump did not give his raucous crowd details. Instead he continued to rail against Clinton, taking slight detours to berate the media and boast about his poll numbers.
“The election of Hillary Clinton in my opinion would lead to the almost total destruction of our country as we know it,” he said.
Speaking at a rally in Pueblo, Colorado, Clinton assailed Trump’s “scorched earth” strategy as a sign of desperation from a campaign in turmoil.
“That just shows how desperate they are,” Clinton said on Wednesday. “That’s all they have left. Pure negativity and pessimism. And we’re not going to let Donald Trump get away with it, are we?”
When Trump protesters interrupted the rally, Clinton laughed: “You do have to feel a little sorry for them. They’ve had a really bad couple of weeks.”
Trump’s campaign advisers told the Wall Street Journal that the Republican nominee has given up trying to reach beyond his base and instead will instead try to amplify turnout among his most loyal supporters.
With just under four weeks left of the campaign, Trump will return to nationalist themes and ratchet up attacks against his opponent in an effort to depress Democratic voter turnout, according to the report.
On Tuesday, Trump signaled that he was done playing nice with the Republican party after a series of high-profile defections last weekend.
“It’s so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
With his campaign in tailspin after a 2005 recording of him using vulgar and lecherous language about women was made public, Trump reserved a few jabs in Florida for the Republican establishment that abruptly abandoned him.
“Already, the Republican nominee has a massive, a massive disadvantage and especially when you have the leaders not putting their weight behind the people,” Trump said, referring to House speaker Paul Ryan, who distanced but did not wholly disavow Trump after the release of the 11-year-old tapes.
“Wouldn’t you think that Paul Ryan would call and say, ‘Good going?’” Trump continued. “You’d think that they’d say, ‘Great going, Don. Let’s go, let’s beat this crook.”
With 27 days left until the election, Trump appeared acutely aware that the time to stabilize his sinking poll numbers and build out his campaign is running out.
“If you’re not registered, get the hell out of here. Leave right now and go and register,” Trump told the crowd.
Trump reminded the crowd that he had invested large sums of his own money into his presidential campaign, and that he did not have to be working so hard at this stage in his life. He claimed the campaign would be the “single biggest waste of time and money” if he didn’t win.
“If we don’t win this election, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told the crowd.
Before Trump appeared on stage, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, his most outspoken and loyal adviser, sought to wind up the crowd with a diatribe against Clinton.
In recalling the aftermath of 9/11, Giuliani wrongly told the crowd: “I don’t remember seeing Hillary Clinton there.” There are numerous photographs of Clinton, then a New York senator, with Giuliani at Ground Zero.