Trump says ‘I shouldn’t have left’ White House, despite losing 2020 election
Donald Trump told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election, while at Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday.
The former president’s remarks were made during one of his final rallies of the campaign, where he also denounced public polls putting him behind his rival Kamala Harris and joked that reporters could take a bullet for him.
The comments were off script – an acknowledgement of how he has become increasingly uninhibited as the fatigue of doing multiple rallies a day has inexorably taken its toll.
Trump stayed on message for some of his remarks, but Trump could not resist reverting to his most problematic impulses of describing Democrats as “demonic” and then lamenting about the 2020 election, an issue that polls poorly and his team had thought they had convinced him to let it go.
“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” and then abruptly cut himself off.
The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.
Once Trump started on the 2020 election, he could not stop. He revived debunked conspiracy theories from 2020 and suggested anew that voting machines would be hacked, and efforts to extend polling hours in Pennsylvania – what his own team has pushed for – amounted to fraud.
Trump also spent time at the rally lashing out at a series of recent polls, notably a Des Moines Register poll in Iowa that put him four points behind Harris in the state of Iowa. Harris is universally not expected to win Iowa, but it could be indicative of her momentum in the final days.
“You really do inflict damage, like you do with this person in Iowa,” Trump said of the Selzer poll done for the Des Moines Register on Saturday. “It is called suppression. They suppress. And it actually should be illegal.”
The Guardian has reported that Trump’s aides are bullish on his chances, even though they concede they have no real idea how must-win states like Pennsylvania will break on election day. Part of the confidence is coming from internal polls that has Trump possibly winning five out of seven battlegrounds.
The trail of grievances extended to reviving an old favorite that he debuted when he was in office: castigating the news media and suggesting that he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.
“To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, because, I don’t mind. I don’t mind,” Trump said from behind panes of bulletproof glass, as some supporters in the crowd laughed and jeered.
