Trump takes his battle to Gettysburg — and vows to sue accusers
GETTYSBURG, Pennsylvania — Donald Trump launched another late attempt to fix his sagging campaign on Saturday, delivering a speech billed as a closing argument in a hotel ballroom near the battlefield that turned the direction of the U.S. Civil War.
Yet, even as the Republican nominee for president praised Abraham Lincoln for uniting the country, Trump laced his Gettysburg speech with familiar charges of a rigged election and corrupt media, along with a new threat against the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.
“All of these liars will be sued when the election is over,” Trump told a small audience at the Eisenhower Hotel.
Just a few hours later in California, an 11th woman came forward to accuse Trump, saying he offered her $10,000 US for sex after meeting her at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament 10 years ago. The Trump campaign called the allegation “false and ridiculous.”
Trump’s Gettysburg event epitomized his campaign’s twilight phase, with a speech in two parts that seemed at odds with each other.
It was at once a confident and forward-looking outline of a Trump administration that would obliterate the Washington establishment and return power to the people, as Trump pledged more than two dozen bills and executive actions in his first 100 days in office.
Yet it was also a lament full of blame, indignation and threats against the forces that Trump says are allied in an all-out effort to deny him the White House.
Intending to look presidential, Trump spoke with a subdued voice from a teleprompter to a small crowd that rarely left its feet, a contrast to two free-wheeling rallies he had in Pennsylvania on Friday.
Trump billed the speech as a policy address that would highlight his first actions as president. But almost all the promises had been made before in other speeches and statements.
They include steep tax reductions, a border wall with Mexico, a constitutional amendment limiting terms for members of Congress and the cancellation of billions of dollars in payments for United Nations climate-change programs. He added details to a recent proposal to impose mandatory minimum criminal sentences for immigrants who return to the U.S. illegally after they have been deported and a promise to freeze most federal government hiring.
Trump had given a similar speech in June during another low point in his campaign, laying out eight promises for his first 100 days in office. Among them: appointing conservative judges, repealing and replacing President Barack Obama’s health-care law and lifting restrictions on energy production.
Before ticking off the policy agenda, though, Trump plowed through the long list of his alleged enemies.
He again tried to define his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as the choice of elites and establishment figures who have no regard for the working class.
“Hillary Clinton is not running against me,” Trump said. “She’s running against change and she’s running against all of the American people and all of the American voters.”
For her part, Clinton has increasingly been looking past the election in her stump speeches as she tries to reach out to Trump voters, many of whom are signalling they will not accept the results of the election if he loses.
“I know there are a lot of people right here in Pennsylvania who have a lot of questions,” she said at a rally in Pittsburgh. “They want to know how we’re going to move forward. They are upset by what they see happening around them. I get that, but anger is not a plan. We need to work together.”
Trump also accused the media repeatedly last week of ignoring three recent national polls that show his campaign ahead of Clinton’s — including the Los Angeles Times poll that showed him leading by a fraction of a percentage point as of Saturday. The majority of national polls, however, along with those from key battleground states, show Trump facing a deepening deficit.