Trump: ‘Cancel the election’
Real estate mogul suggests that he be given the presidency
TOLEDO — Donald Trump sought to build on a reed-thin lead during three campaign stops in Ohio on Thursday — and even suggested that the election should be scrapped.
“We should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right?” the Republican presidential nominee asked supporters while campaigning in this midwestern industrial city. “What are we even having it for? Her policies are so bad!”
Trump once again attacked the stamina of Democrat Hillary Clinton and said that he would reopen federal investigations into her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state and her family’s charitable foundation.
“Hillary Clinton put the office of secretary of state up for sale,” he said. “And if she got the chance, she’d put the Oval Office up for sale.”
In a scary moment Thursday night, Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence’s campaign plane slid off the runway during a rainstorm at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, tearing up two tracks of concrete before coming to rest on a patch of grass.
Pence told reporters that no one had been injured.
“We can see mud on the front windows,” a calm Pence said in the press cabin about a minute after the plane came to rest. He said he felt fine.
After a bumpy approach, the plane roughly-landed and slammed into the ground, making first contact with the runway concrete. The pilot slammed on the brakes and passengers could smell burning rubber.
The roughly 40 passengers and crew, including Pence, were evacuated through the back of the plane.
Campaigning earlier Thursday in Springfield, Ohio, Trump claimed again that Clinton appeared “tired” after the last two debates. He seemed to imply that she was on the verge of needing physical assistance.
Trump said she is “a low energy person.” Then, without presenting any evidence, he claimed that she was in bad physical shape after their most recent debates.
“I watched after the last debate and after the second debate. She was tired, wow. She walked off that stage, of course she had a lot of people around; they had a lot of people around her, which was smart,” Trump said.
No evidence has emerged that Clinton was suffering physically during or after the debates.
Trump has regularly sought to raise doubts about Clinton’s health. He recently began airing a television ad that shows Clinton stumbling as she tried to get into a vehicle after a ceremony commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York. After that incident Clinton revealed that she had been stricken with pneumonia.
Trump also took aim at the Clintons’ charitable foundation and financial dealings, pointing to private communications released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, including a memo by top Bill Clinton aide Doug Band.
“The more emails WikiLeaks releases, the more lines between the Clinton Foundation, the secretary of state’s office and the Clintons’ personal finances, they all get blurred,” Trump said.
In an interview published Thursday by Billboard magazine, Bill Clinton weighed in on Trump’s criticisms, saying that the attacks on his foundation are frustrating.
“It’s hard to hear because I know good and well that a lot of the people that are saying it know it’s not true. It’s an insult to all the people who have worked there,” he said in an otherwise favorable profile of the former president’s charity and its ties to top performing artists, including Jon Bon Jovi.
Polling released Thursday afternoon by Quinnipiac University showed the tick-tock nature of the race in the closing days. According to the poll, Trump holds a one-point edge over Clinton in Georgia — 44 percent to 43 percent — but they’re tied at 44 percent each in Iowa. In North Carolina, Clinton holds a four-point advantage (47 percent to 43 percent), while she holds a 12-point edge in Virginia.
Clinton tops Trump 48 percent to 42 percent among likely voters in the tracking poll conducted jointly by The Washington Post and ABC News.
Clinton’s margin in the survey has barely changed from her 47-43 edge in a mid-October Post-ABC poll, but is less than the double-digit leads in earlier waves of the tracking survey reported by ABC News through Monday.