Donald Trump took a victory lap at a campaign rally in Virginia one day after bulldozing Joe Biden and millions of viewers with lies and inflated claims at the first 2024 presidential debate.
The former president said the upcoming election isn’t about whether the clearly struggling Biden can “survive a 90-minute debate” but whether America can survive another four years under his presidency, suggesting that the country might not “survive another five months.”
Trump – who spent his remarks in Chesapeake repeating his nonsensical and false statements about abortion, immigration, the climate crisis and the 2020 election – told Biden that the country “doesn’t want” him and to “get the hell out of here.”
“Many people are saying after last night’s performance that Joe Biden is leaving the race, but the fact is I don’t believe that,” said Trump, suggesting that Biden polls better than other potential Democratic candidates.
“It’s hard to believe, but Crooked Joe Biden polls better than those people,” he said.
Trump’s campaign helped negotiate and agreed to the terms of the CNN debate. Yet Trump said that his rival “got the debate rules that he wanted, he got the date that he wanted, he got the network he wanted with the moderators he wanted.”
The former president – who continues to repeat the lie that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him – suggested that Biden was trying to somehow rig the debate.
“No amount of rest or rigging could help him defend his atrocious record,” Trump said.
Trump maintained his apocalyptic vision of an America in decline and repeated his lies that doctors are killing babies after birth and a bogus allegation raised at the debate that immigrants are “taking Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”
He said rising sea levels aren’t an existential crisis but an opportunity for “waterfront property,” that global warming is “fine,” that Hollywood casting directors are scoping out his crowds, and that he knows “more about weapons than just about anybody” as he warned that the nation is on the brink of a third World War.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the nation’s highest-ranking Jewish politician, “has become a Palestinian,” Trump said.
Last night, Biden reminded viewers that Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly said Trump called dead military veterans “suckers” and “losers.” Trump said Biden made that up.
At his rally, Trump called Kelly “the dumbest of them all.”
“He was lost in The White House. That guy didn’t know what the hell was happening. We used to call him a lost soul,” he said.
Biden and Trump held competing rallies on Friday hours after the president appeared lost and glassy-eyed during CNN’s debate in Atlanta, were he struggled to counter Trump’s unchecked, bogus statements during their first debate since the 2020 election.
From his rally in North Carolina, Biden sought to recast the performance, saying that he had “spent 90 minutes on stage debating a guy who has the morals of an alley cat.”
“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he said at the end of his remarks in Raleigh.
“Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as well as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden added. “But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to to this job.”