Donald Trump kicked off his 2020 re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday night, tearing into his Democratic opponents and pledging to combat “criminal aliens” in a wild address to his most ardent supporters.
Addressing a 20,000-strong crowd, Trump complained he had been “under assault from the very first day” of his presidency by a “fake news media” and “illegal witch hunt” that had tried to keep him and his supporters down.
“This election is a verdict on whether we want to live in a country where the people will lose an election, refuse to concede and spend the next two years trying to shred our Constitution and rip your country apart,” he said, gloating over the outcome of the Mueller report and ignoring his own flagrant disregard for the institutions of governance.
On his enemies in the House of Representatives, his attack was particularly vicious, not to say deranged.
Trump painted a disturbing picture of what life would look like if he loses in 2020, accusing his critics of “un-American conduct” and telling the crowd that Democrats “want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.”
“A vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of the American dream,” he said.
With staggering chutzpah and a liberating lack of self-awareness, Trump claimed his MAGA movement is about reclaiming power “from a permanent political class that enriched itself at your expense”.
On policy, the president promised to cure cancer and AIDs and to “lay the foundations” for a US-led Mars landing, taking credit for historic lows in unemployment and a renewable energy boom (despite backing fossil fuel extraction) while rounding on his enemies in the press as the packed Amway Center chanted “Bioreports sucks!”
On immigration, he said, ominously: “Wait until you see some of the things you are going to be hearing about over the next few months. Our country should be a sanctuary for law-abiding citizens, not for criminal aliens.”
Trump told his fans he personally had redesigned the US-Mexico border wall under construction to keep out illegal immigrants: “It’s stronger, bigger, better and cheaper”.
The president also renewed his attack on defeated 2016 rival Hillary Clinton – whose very name brought fresh howls of “Lock her up!” – hinting darkly that attorney general William Barr could still prosecute her over her failure to use secure government communication channels to carry out official business while serving as secretary of state.
“If you want to know how the system is rigged, just compared how they came after us for three years with everything they had compared to the free pass they gave to Hillary and her aides after they set an illegal server, destroyed evidence, deleted an acid washed 33,000 emails, exposed classified information, and turned the State Department into a pay-for-play cash machine,” Trump said. “33,000 emails deleted!”
Extraordinarily, even by his standards, the president also accused his predecessor, Barack Obama, of colluding against him with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
It was, all told, a crazy, crazy night in Orlando.
Our own Clark Mindock was there. Here’s his eye-witness account.
