Trump says he “should not have left” the White House as he closes his campaign with an increasingly dark message

() – Donald Trump, who said Sunday in Pennsylvania who regrets leaving the White House in 2021, is ending the 2024 campaign the same way he started it: doling out a mix of violent, derogatory rhetoric and repeated warnings that he will not concede if defeat comes.

At a rally in a key must-win state, the former president told supporters he “shouldn’t have left” office after losing the 2020 election, described Democrats as “demonic” and complained about a new poll that no longer shows him leading in Iowa, where he won twice.

Trump spent much of his speech railing against alleged election interference this year and lamenting leaving office after losing to Joe Biden four years ago. The day he left office, the United States had the “most secure border in the history of our country,” Trump said.

“Honestly, I shouldn’t have left,” he continued, remembering the consequences of the last election.

Trump, acknowledging that he had gone off script in a county he won by more than 15 points in 2020, again claimed without evidence that this vote was rigged against him.

“Isn’t this better than my speech?” Trump said. “Because, honestly, someone has to talk about this.”

His comments marked a continuation of the increasingly vindictive message that dominated the final weeks of his campaign: promises to retaliate against his political rivals, angry and threatening tirades against media outlets, increasingly outlandish claims about the 2020 election and its desire to have total power if the presidency returns.

At one point, the former president, who has been the target of at least two assassination attempts, said he “wouldn’t care” if a gunman aiming at him also fired shots through “fake news.”

“I have this piece of glass here, but all we have here is fake news, right? And to catch me, someone would have to cut through the fake news,” Trump said at a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “And that doesn’t bother me that much. “It doesn’t bother me.”

A Trump campaign spokesperson said after the rally that the former president was actually reflecting on how the press was protecting him.

“President Trump was saying that the media was in danger since they were protecting him and therefore they themselves were in great danger, and they should have had a protective glass shield as well. There can be no other interpretation of what he said. “He was actually looking out for their well-being much more than his own!” Steven Cheung said in a statement.

The new round of threats and scandalous statements from the former president ends a campaign with one of the darkest and most threatening final messages in modern American history. In recent weeks, Trump has redoubled his commitment to using the military to combat the civilian “enemy within” and has reflected – under the pretext of arguing that he was the pro-peace candidate – on how the US would fare. former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of his staunchest conservative Republican critics, with guns “pointed in her face” in a war zone.

This weekend has brought with it its own series of strange moments. On Sunday, Trump told NBC that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent post on

“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but I’m fine with it,” Trump told NBC. “You know, it’s possible.”

And one night earlier, in North Carolina, Trump chuckled approvingly at a member of the public’s suggestion that Vice President Kamala Harris worked as a prostitute. After Trump insisted once again that Harris didn’t work at a McDonald’s when she was younger, a supporter in Greensboro yelled, “She worked on a corner!”

Trump laughed, paused, then declared, “This place is amazing.”

As the crowd laughed, he added: “Just remember it’s other people saying it, it’s not me.”

His response to the crude comment underscored how the rot in American political discourse, a long-running spiral, accelerated after Trump’s arrival on the presidential campaign trail in 2015. It’s a contrast to seven years earlier, when a John McCain supporter said during a campaign event that Barack Obama was lying about his identity, claiming “He’s an Arab,” and the then-GOP candidate took the microphone from his hands, insisting that his rival was “a decent family man.” (and) citizen with whom I simply have disagreements on fundamental issues.”

But even then, Trump was lurking. He would soon emerge as one of the leading proponents of the “birther” conspiracy theory, a racist narrative that claimed Obama was not born in the United States.

In the run-up to this year’s election, Trump has used the former president’s full name – Barack Hussein Obama – in an attempt to demonize him. He frequently mispronounces Harris’s first name, although he has already shown that he knows the correct way to say it and has called her a “f***ing vice president.”

On other occasions, Trump has fallen into farce. During a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, last month, he took time to remember the naked body of the late golf great Arnold Palmer.

“Arnold Palmer was a man, and I say this with all due respect to women, I love women,” Trump said. “He was strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when he showered with the other professionals, when they left there they would say, ‘Oh, my God. That’s incredible.’”

Trump’s message to women (and increasingly about them) has also become increasingly strange. At a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last week, he told the crowd that his attendees had asked him to stop saying he would be the “protector” of American women, in part because they considered it inappropriate.

“Sir, please don’t say that,” said Trump, who advised him. “Because? I am president. I want to protect the women of our country. Well, I’m going to do it, whether women like it or not.”

Recent polls show the former president trailing Harris among women by a significant margin, across all demographic groups. Neither Trump nor his allies have denied the numbers and instead have implored more men to vote.

“Early voting has been disproportionately female,” said Charlie Kirk, the leader of a right-wing group that Trump has entrusted with managing much of his field strategy. “If men stay at home Kamala is president. It’s that simple.”

Kamala Harris has countered Trump’s somber offers with promises to end the tribal clashes that have defined most of the last decade.

“Our democracy does not require that we agree on everything. That’s not the American way,” Harris said during a speech last week from the Ellipse in Washington. “We like good debates. And just because someone disagrees with us doesn’t make them ‘the enemy within’. They are family members, neighbors, classmates, co-workers.”

“It can be easy to forget a simple truth,” he added. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

The vice president has also put a spotlight on Trump’s attacks on his rivals and critics, including a persistent insistence that he wants to use the power of the federal government to punish them. Instead, Harris likes to say she is focused on policy, such as the push to restore federal abortion rights following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“On day one, if Donald Trump is elected, he will walk into that office with a list of enemies,” Harris said in Washington. “When I am elected, I will go in with a to-do list full of priorities for what I will do for the American people.”