Delivering a reliably red-meat, 80-minute speech, Trump revisited his recent lines of attack on American inner cities — including Baltimore, which he has maligned in recent days — and tried to associate inner-city crime with the ineptitude of Democratic lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker.
“No one has paid a higher price than Americans living in our inner cities,” Trump told supporters who had gathered in an arena in Cincinnati. Accusing the country’s largest and most diverse cities of being under single-party control, he added: “The conditions of Nancy Pelosi’s once great city of San Francisco are deplorable. Do you remember the word deplorable?”
In the hours after a debate in which a crowd of 2020 candidates tried to attack President Barack Obama’s immigration policies as too stringent, Trump almost seemed to marvel that his name had not come up.
“The Democrats spent more time attacking Barack Obama than they did attacking me, practically,” Trump said.
Using the same arsenal of insults and anecdotes, Trump seemed intent on recapturing the firebrand appeal of his campaign to voters in swing states. Ohio was selected for the event because his reelection effort considers the state, along with other Midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, as critical to winning a second term.
A Quinnipiac University poll last month showed former Vice President Joe Biden Biden leading Trump in Ohio, 50% to 42%, although the president has insisted that such surveys are no more trustworthy than the predictions that he would lose in a landslide in 2016.
In recent weeks, the president has been engaged in a racially charged war of words with critics of color like Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the Baltimore congressman, and a nearly all-white crowd on Thursday did little to help make the case that African Americans have welcomed his inflammatory language. But a small group of African American supporters drew enthusiastic cheers when they stood and held up signs and T-shirts with messages like “Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist” and “Blacks For Trump.”
Trump was interrupted by protesters twice during the rally, stopping at one juncture to watch as a group holding a sign that read “Immigrants Built America” was ejected from the arena.
“You must have a Democrat mayor?” Trump asked, leaning toward the edge of the stage to survey crowdgoers as he waited for the protesters to clear out. “Do you have a Democrat mayor?”
Still, Trump’s fans expressed unbridled enthusiasm for him despite — or perhaps because of — the various altercations he provokes in Washington. They came wearing the traditional red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps and waved preprinted signs like “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” and “Women for Trump.”
Many were watching to see if his supporters repeated the “Send her back” chant of his last rally, in North Carolina, calling for the expulsion of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who came to the United States as a Somali refugee and was naturalized as a citizen while a teenager. Trump sent mixed signals in the hours before the rally about whether they should do that.
“I can’t tell you whether or not they’re going to do that chant. If they do the chant, we’ll have to see what happens,” he told reporters before leaving the White House. At the rally, Trump stayed away from attacking Omar, instead focusing on the broad threat of Democratic policies, and the chant did not arise.
He did pause to attack Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who was hailed this week for her willingness at the debates to forcefully defend her ideas in a crowded Democratic field, for claiming Native American ancestry.
“I have more Indian blood than she does,” Trump said, “and I have none — I’m sorry.”
Before the rally, Trump appeared preoccupied with the performance of the Democratic candidates in the debates, offering his assessment as he left the White House.
“I think that Kamala did not do well last night,” he told reporters, referring to Sen. Kamala Harris of California. “I think Biden did OK. He came through. He came limping through, as I say about Sleepy Joe. He limped right through it. But he got through it. He really did. I think he was OK.”
Even Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump has praised as one of the “nicest human beings,” tried his hand at ribbing the Democrats before the president took the stage: “Those people were standing so far to the left I thought that stage was going to flip over.”
The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is contemplating a political career of his own, warmed up the crowd by attacking the family’s favorite targets, including former special counsel Robert Mueller, Cummings, Biden, Hillary Clinton, Pelosi and the “fake news” media.
The younger Trump mimicked Mueller’s halting answers before Congress last week and accused Democrats of cynically crying racism as a political cudgel against his father. And he said the party’s presidential candidates had embarrassed themselves during their debates this week, making it easier for his father to secure a second term in next year’s election.
“Thank you for your in-kind contribution to reelecting my father in 2020,” he said. He singled out Biden, mocking the former vice president’s performance at Wednesday night’s debate.
During a speech that was meandering at times — “I don’t use the teleprompter very much,” the president said — he made sure to thank his son for his rally performance and revisit that hit list, yet again calling Biden “Sleepy Joe” and sarcastically saying Mueller appeared “sharp as a tack” during his testimony.
As he closed in on the hour mark, the president veered away from his usual campaign messaging and toward more trivial matters, such as his ability to pronounce the city of Lima, Ohio, correctly. It was a trick he learned during his winning campaign bid in 2016, he said, seeming almost wistful for that time.
“I had such a great life,” Trump said. “It was so easy.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.