2024 Elections

It was Trump at his most aggrieved and discursive on Sunday, as Election Day nears.

Donald Trump diverged almost immediately from his prepared remarks when he took the stage over an hour late Sunday morning at the Lancaster Airport in central Pennsylvania. | Evan Vucci/AP

By Lisa Kashinsky and Natalie Allison

11/03/2024 06:03 PM EST

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LITITZ, Pennsylvania — Donald Trump barreled through Sunday in a state of seeming rage from which nothing and no one appeared safe.

He said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in January of 2020, a remarkable admission from a former president whose attempts to cling to power led to a deadly riot at the Capitol. He suggested he wouldn’t “mind” if someone had to “shoot through the fake news” to get to him, an escalation of violent rhetoric that his team quickly sought to clean up.

He further worked to stoke fears about a rigged election in a county where some voter-registration applications remain under review for potential fraud. And he railed against “crooked” polls that showed warning signs for his campaign.

And that was all in just one rally, on his penultimate day on the trail.

It was Trump at his most aggrieved and discursive — he marveled at several points here that he had veered quite far off his teleprompter script — a window into the former president’s psyche in the final hours of his two-year campaign to retake the White House that he still, as he indicated Sunday, falsely believes was stolen from him.

Trump traded his blunt anger for a toned-down but still rambling campaign speech at his next stop in North Carolina. But his comments from Lititz were still circulating widely online.

“It is everything a Republican does not want to hear and everything that Donald Trump and his base wants to hear,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee. “Part of the reason why he’s running is........

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