Hours before the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, former President Donald J. Trump traveled to Wisconsin and gave two rambling speeches laden with tangents, largely jettisoning any particular focus as he boasted about negotiating over the cost of a new Air Force One and lamented that a 1987 Vietnam War movie had not won an Academy Award.
In Waunakee, Wis., Mr. Trump opened his first campaign event of the day, which he acknowledged was meant to center on his manufacturing agenda, with a digressive response to Iran’s launching a missile attack against Israel, touching more on unrelated grievances about Vice President Kamala Harris than on the Middle East.
Then he traveled to Milwaukee for a meandering news conference in which he dismissed climate change, invoked the Great Depression, falsely insisted that Democrats cheat on elections and only barely touched on school choice, the issue that Mr. Trump’s campaign signaled would be his focus there.
In an event that lasted for an hour and a half, the former president jumped from topic to topic in shifts that were often hard to follow. Mr. Trump, who often criticizes President Biden for errors in his remarks, erroneously referred to Iran as Iraq. Later, he swapped in North Korea in a lament he has been making recently about Iran threatening his life.
Saying that the Secret Service had been burdened by the security needs of the recent U.N. General Assembly, Mr. Trump complained that officials “said that we have to guard the United Nations, which meant the president of North Korea, who is basically trying to kill me.” He added, “So they want to guard him, but they don’t want to guard me.”
Mr. Trump has previously boasted of his relationship with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, but his campaign has said it has been briefed about threats from Iran to assassinate him.
With five weeks until the election, Mr. Trump’s advisers have urged him to focus on policy, and in particular on the economy, an issue that they believe could give him the edge in critical battleground states like Wisconsin.
But Mr. Trump, who has made his disdain for policy-focused events clear in previous speeches, has stuck to familiar instincts, often abandoning his prepared remarks to follow his thought patterns to issues of less interest to voters.
During his news conference, he spent significant time reviving old grievances. He suggested he wanted more credit for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he blamed on China. He insisted he would not return to “60 Minutes” without an apology from CBS News after his contentious 2020 interview on the show. And he spent nearly four minutes talking about his back-and-forth with Boeing over Air Force One.
And Mr. Trump at times interrupted his own asides with even further asides. While discussing the prowess of fighters in Afghanistan, Mr. Trump said that “they could take a knife, they were like Rambos, just like putting a million Rambos — good old Sylvester Stallone was my friend. But it’s like putting a million Rambos.”
The question had been about whether he would have used U.S. military force to respond to Iran’s attack against Israel.
When pressed, Mr. Trump avoided an answer. But when asked about an Iranian missile strike that left more than 100 American troops with traumatic brain injuries in 2020, Mr. Trump dismissed the injuries as headaches as he tried to argue that he was tougher than Mr. Biden on Iran.
“What does ‘injured’ mean?” Mr. Trump said. “Injured means — you mean because they had a headache, because the bombs never hit the fort?”
Mr. Trump’s response to Iran’s attack against Israel has largely consisted of familiar criticism of the Biden administration’s stance on the Middle East. He again insisted that the world was nearing global devastation and fell back on his frequent hypothetical that he would have prevented the crisis in the Middle East had he won in 2020.
But much of his response to the crisis at Tuesday’s first campaign event devolved into digressions in which he criticized San Francisco, attacked Ms. Harris’s response to Hurricane Helene, stoked fears around immigration, blasted the 2022 prisoner swap deal with Russia that freed Brittney Griner, repeated his false claims of widespread election fraud and asserted that the 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” should have won an Oscar.
He falsely claimed Iran went broke under sanctions that were imposed while he was president and argued that the Biden administration had not taken a tough enough stance toward the country.
At one point, as he insisted that there would not have been a war in Gaza had he won in 2020, he abruptly pivoted.
“This would have never happened in the Middle East,” Mr. Trump said. “It wouldn’t have been on Oct. 7. You wouldn’t have had inflation. You know, we’ll go to a different topic. You wouldn’t have had inflation. None of these things would have happened.” Then, he began talking about the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Mr. Trump’s responses to current events were in themselves a detour. As he stood inside Dane Manufacturing, a contract manufacturer and metal fabricator, he told the crowd he would give a “speech on economics and bringing back business and things.”
But it was not until more than 30 minutes into a speech that ran for more than an hour that Mr. Trump began to discuss the economy at length, a shift that he acknowledged as he promised “a manufacturing renaissance and a booming middle class, which is really what I’m here to talk about.”
And Mr. Trump’s tendency to ditch the script threatened to overshadow his intended message.
Before he arrived in Milwaukee for his news conference, a panel of speakers, including other elected officials and students, focused on school choice. And when he finally got to the subject, Mr. Trump insisted that he thought “school choice is the civil rights issue of our time.”
Later, he suggested that he wanted to replace the federal Department of Education with “one person plus a secretary” who would ask schools, “What are you doing, reading, writing and arithmetic, and are you not teaching woke?” He added, “Not teaching woke is a very big factor.”
During the 40 minutes in which he took reporters’ questions, Mr. Trump was not asked about the issue.
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