On a night when Barack Obama joined Kamala Harris onstage at a star-studded rally in Georgia, Donald J. Trump was smarting on the other side of the country — asking why Mr. Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and not him.
Mr. Trump challenged Mr. Obama’s qualifications for the award while campaigning in Las Vegas, the second stop on a swing through two western states where he and Ms. Harris are locked in a tight race.
“He didn’t even know why the hell he got it,” said Mr. Trump, who had spent years trying to undermine the legitimacy of the country’s first Black president with baseless claims about his citizenship.
Mr. Trump suggested he was more deserving of the honor than his predecessor in the White House, saying his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, twice for emphasis.
“I got elected in a much bigger, better, crazier election, but they gave him the Nobel Prize,” he said.
With 12 days until Election Day, Mr. Trump sharpened his attacks on Ms. Harris over immigration on Thursday, using the speech in Nevada and another in Arizona to gin up support for his plans to begin the largest mass deportation in U.S. history if elected.
“We’re like a garbage can for the world,” he said during a speech at Arizona State University, where he repeatedly vilified migrants.
Mr. Trump clung to that theme a few hours later at a rally held by Turning Point PAC, a group aligned with him, saying that Democrats had allowed an “invasion” of illegal immigrants. He said their border policies were the result of stupidity, hatred for the country and a desire to get illegal immigrants to vote for them.
Mr. Trump’s message followed the typical contours of his often-rambling speeches, bringing up lingering grievances and casting the prospect of Ms. Harris’s winning the election as a catastrophe for the country.
“If Kamala gets four more years, she will obliterate our economy, kill millions of jobs — kill thousands of people, too, by the way — and destroy your family finances probably forever,” Mr. Trump told the crowd.
In between the two rallies, the former president visited a Cuban restaurant and bakery about 10 minutes off the Las Vegas Strip with Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who grew up in Las Vegas and whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba. Mr. Rubio joined him at all three of his stops on Thursday, part of an apparent effort by Mr. Trump to cultivate support from Latino voters.
From the onset of his remarks in Las Vegas, where he was introduced by former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, an estranged former Democrat who is now a Republican, Mr. Trump acknowledged watching Ms. Harris’s rally in Georgia.
He told his audience that Ms. Harris had “bombed” during the event and falsely claimed that he was far ahead of her in the polls in several battleground states that will most likely decide the election.
“She’s actually imploding, if you take a look,” he said.
He also played a clip from her appearance one night earlier on a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania, a forum that he had declined to participate in. In the clip, Ms. Harris was asked by Anderson Cooper whether she had made any mistakes: she said of course she had as a parent and was perhaps at times overly deliberative on difficult issues. The crowd jeered and one person in the audience shouted an obscenity.
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