At his first campaign rally since he survived an assassination attempt last week, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday launched a litany of attacks that suggested his call for national unity in the wake of the shooting had faded entirely into the background.
Over the course of an almost two-hour speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., Mr. Trump insulted President Biden’s intelligence repeatedly, calling him “stupid” more than once. He said Vice President Kamala Harris was “crazy” and gleefully jeered the Democratic Party’s infighting over Mr. Biden’s political future.
Even as Mr. Trump made numerous false claims accusing his political opponents of widespread election fraud, he presented the continuing push by some Democrats to replace Mr. Biden on their ticket as an anti-democratic effort.
By contrast, Mr. Trump — who falsely insisted he won the 2020 election and whose effort to overturn it spurred a violent attack on the Capitol that threatened the peaceful transfer of power — presented himself as an almost martyr trying to protect the United States from its downfall.
“They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy,’” Mr. Trump told the crowd of thousands inside the Van Andel Arena. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do with democracy’? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy.”
The line — one of the few additions to a speech that culled from Mr. Trump’s standard rally repertoire — came as Mr. Trump was trying to rebut Democrats’ claims that he was an extremist and distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a potential second term that would overhaul the federal government.
The Biden campaign has repeatedly tried to tie Mr. Trump to the effort, which has involved Trump allies and former advisers. But Mr. Trump on Saturday criticized the project as the work of the “radical right,” even as he acknowledged that he knew some of those involved.
“They’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it,” Mr. Trump said of Project 2025 — which he kept calling “Project 25,” even as he has previously referred to it by its full name.
Saturday’s speech was the latest signal that the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump had done little to change his political message. Though his closing convention speech on Thursday opened with a somber call for unity, he reverted quickly to standard rally repertoire, including an aside comparing himself to the gangster Al Capone and a discursive tangent regarding sharks and electric boats.
Mr. Trump did discuss the assassination attempt, in which his ear was struck by a bullet at a rally last week in Butler, Pa., even though he said on Thursday that after his convention speech he would not describe it in detail again.
Sporting a light brown bandage on his ear, smaller than the large white gauze he had been wearing, Mr. Trump once again cited divine intervention, telling the crowd, “I shouldn’t here.” He offered praise for Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter and rally attendee who was killed in the gunfire, and thanked officials in Butler for their efforts.
But where Mr. Trump was somber and visibly affected in front of the Republican delegates and national network cameras, a moment of seeming vulnerability, on Saturday he at times struck a somewhat lighter tone discussing the shooting.
At one point, referring to a screen showing a chart on immigration that he was pointing to when the shooting began, Mr. Trump joked that “I owe immigration” my life and that the “sign was very good — I think I’m going to sleep with it tonight.”
Before Mr. Trump spoke, his newly chosen running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, took the stage and marveled at the former president’s resilience.
“I find it hard to believe that a week ago an assassin tried to take Donald Trump’s life, and now we have a hell of a crowd to welcome him back on the campaign trail,” Mr. Vance said, in his first joint rally with Mr. Trump since he joined the Republican ticket.
Though the security procedures at the rally were largely unchanged from past Trump rallies, the venue was held indoors after the Trump campaign had largely held events outdoors. There was a heavier police presence than typical inside and outside the building.
Sean Solano, a 22-year-old missionary to Nicaragua, said he had taken one extra precaution in light of the shooting.
“On Wednesday, I prayed over the building,” Mr. Solano, of Cutlerville, Mich., said about the rally’s venue. Echoing several other rally attendees who spoke of Mr. Trump’s survival in religious terms, Mr. Solano added that he thought God had given the former president a chance, and now Mr. Trump would “fight with fury like never before.”
Mr. Trump’s dark message about the pernicious threat to the country posed by undocumented immigrants, Democrats and foreign adversaries, a signature theme from previous rallies, was largely intact. He broadly characterized those crossing the border as “prisoners and people from mental institutions,” whom he again likened to the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter. And he promised once more the largest deportation operation in U.S. history if elected.
Mr. Trump also joyously mocked Democrats as they contended with the viability of Mr. Biden’s place as the party’s presidential nominee. Mr. Trump called his rivals “the enemies of democracy” because Democrats who call for Mr. Biden’s replacement would have to answer to the millions of primary votes the president secured over other candidates.
“They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we. That’s a problem,” Mr. Trump said in a tone that suggested he thought anything but.
Building on months of attacking Democrats as a threat to democracy, usually based on his false insistence that Mr. Biden has directed all four criminal cases against him, he argued once more that it was his political opponents who were anti-democratic.
“This guy goes, and he gets the votes, and now we’ll take it away,” Mr. Trump scoffed. “That’s democracy.”
Still, Mr. Trump showed little sympathy for Mr. Biden. After mostly, though not entirely, avoiding direct personal attacks against the president in his convention speech, Mr. Trump repeatedly called him unintelligent, saying that he had a low I.Q. compared with other world leaders and that he was incompetent.
He widened his focus to include Ms. Harris, insulting her laugh and calling her “nuts.” He similarly called Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, “crazy,” and then mocked her over her having privately told Mr. Biden that he might not win in November, which he characterized as a sudden display of disloyalty.
“Crazy Nancy,” Mr. Trump said. “Did you see Nancy Pelosi is selling out Biden now? Did you see she turned on him like a dog?”
Republicans, he pointed out, were unified largely behind him. As evidence, Mr. Trump ceded the stage to a display of party unity: Sandy Pensler, a Republican running in Michigan’s Senate primary, took the stage to end his bid and endorse his Trump-endorsed rival, Representative Mike Rogers.
“Unifying the party,” Mr. Trump said as he took back the microphone, “it’s beautiful to watch.”
Michigan is seen as a critical battleground state for both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden in November. It is one of several that Mr. Trump won in 2016 only to lose to Mr. Biden four years later.
The decision to hold Mr. Trump’s first joint rally with Mr. Vance in the state offered another signal of its electoral importance. Mr. Trump, when he announced Mr. Vance’s selection, singled out his ability to win over workers in the state, and Mr. Vance several times in his convention speech mentioned working-class people in Michigan as crucial to the nation.
Mr. Vance gave a well-received 13-minute speech — a fraction of Mr. Trump’s lengthy remarks — more than an hour before Mr. Trump took the stage. He returned later to introduce the former president to raucous applause, and the two embraced in front of the crowd.
“I chose him because he’s for the worker,” Mr. Trump said after Mr. Vance left the stage. “He’s for the people that work so hard and perhaps weren’t treated like they should have been.”
The post A Week After Shooting, Trump Leaves Unity Behind and Returns to Insults and Election Denial appeared first on New York Times.
