President Donald Trump stripped the bark off his Democratic opponents on Thursday, saying his ‘hateful and enraged’ adversaries ‘are destroying this country’ and ‘won’t come close’ to beating him in 2020.
‘They know it,’ he charged during a fist-pumping Dallas rally, blasting ‘Crazy Nancy’ Pelosi and ‘Shifty’ Adam Schiff.
‘I really don’t believe anymore that they love our country,’ the president said, drawing chants of ‘Four more years!’ from a rowdy arena at the tail end of a day spent raising money, cutting ribbons and pressing the flesh.
‘They hate our country,’ he said again.
A subpoena-happy Pelosi, he vented, ‘hands them out like it’s cookies.’ Trump joked: ‘I have people getting subpoenas I’ve never heard of! I said, “Who are those people?”‘
President Donald Trump held a campaign rally at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Thursday to a screaming crowd estimated at 20,000
Members of the audience cheer as President Donald Trump takes the stage at a campaign rally at American Airlines Arena
A corrupt former Vice President Joe Biden, he charged, had grifted and grafted his way through China and Ukraine with his son Hunter and reaped millions.
Trump called the Bidens’ actions ‘you-know-what and pillage.’
‘It’s the “R” word. “You-know-what” and pillage. You know what word I’m talking about, right?’ he said, referring to the word ‘rape.’
‘I don’t want to use it because they’ll say it’s a horrible word that Trump used,’ the president added, pointing to ranks of TV cameras a basketball court away.
He hammered the still-unnamed whistle-blower whose report on an infamous call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky provided Schiff and his House Intelligence Committee with powerful ammunition – after first meeting committee staffers.
‘Who is the whistle-blower?’ Trump demanded. ‘We have to know! Is the whistle-blower a spy?’
‘Dumb’ Beto O’Rourke, he said, tone-deafly ‘pledged to revoke the tax-exempt status of many churches and religious charities’ after saying ‘”We’re going to take your guns away”.’
O’Rourke had said churches that refuse to perform same-sex marriages should lose federal tax benefits afforded to other nonprofit organizations. He also warned that if he were president, owners of AR-15s and other military-style rifles would lose them.
People cheer and hold signs of support for President Donald Trump as he arrives at the Dallas rally
A man wears a ‘Trump’s Tweets Matter’ shirt to the Dallas rally
‘In a few short weeks, [he] got rid of guns and got rid of religion,’ he mocked, saying that in Texas ‘that doesn’t work.’
‘There are a lot of bad people out there, but one by one we’re advancing,’ he said.
Then-candidate Trump had his first king-size campaign rally at American Airlines Center in September 2015. He returned more than four years later to a screaming, foot-stomping crowd estimated at 20,000.
Other than Secret Service screening and the slogan swap of ‘Keep America Great’ for ‘Make America Great Again,’ the scenes were practically identical.
‘We were here then, and we’re here now, and we’ll be here when President Trump is re-elected!’ Emma Davis of North Dallas told DailyMail.com, screaming over the pre-show music.
Asked if he was worried Democrats might turn an avalanche of scandal into impeachment, and then a 2020 defeat, Juan Rodriguez took off his red baseball cap and exclaimed: ‘Are you f***ing kidding me? It’s jobs and taxes!’
‘They don’t want him to get credit for nothing, so they come up with fiction and people like you write it,’ the Fort Worth man added, lowering his voice in the gap between Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ and ‘Macho Man,’ the Village People anthem.
‘It’s fake news,’ he said. ‘Fake news. Have you heard that one?’
The faithful danced and cheered for Trump, waving nearly as many cowboy hats as campaign signs.
‘Women for Trump, ‘Latinos for Trump,’ and ‘Cops for Trump’ placards fluttered as a tween-age girl ran with arms up, encouraging a stadium wave. Seats were hard to come by, aside from private luxury boxes whose owners left them empty for the night.
Trump’s warmup acts included Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who generated a frenzy of hoots and applause by saying Trump’s Democratic rivals ‘are not our opponents. They are our enemy.’
While Trump’s political machine was working overtime to recapture his 2016 magic, the White House was embroiled in a day of loud news cycles and near-crises.
Trump smiles as his supporters cheer ‘Four more years!’ at the Dallas rally at the American Airlines Center
US President Donald Trump speaks during a ‘Keep America Great’ rally at the Amercian Airlines Center in Dallas
In the space of eight hours the administration touted a fragile five-day Turkish ceasefire in Syria, confirmed the impending departure of Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and scrambled to walk back the White House’s first apparent admission of diplomatic horse-trading in the bubbling Ukraine scandal.
Touring a Louis Vuitton factory in north Texas, the president told DailyMail.com that he has ‘a lot of confidence’ in Mick Mulvaney.
The acting White House chief of staff seemed to say during a press briefing that the president had conditioned U.S. military aid money on the willingness of Ukraine’s new president to investigate Joe Biden, a high-profile 2020 Trump rival.
As Mulvaney insisted later that Trump had been interested only in backward-looking corruption probes linked to the chaos of the 2016 campaign, the president told DailyMail.com that he hadn’t been watching his chief.
The press corps traveling aboard Air Force One could see Mulvaney making Democrats’ case for a quid-pro-quo in real time on a pair of screens which, like one in the president’s airborne workspace, are perennially tuned to Fox News.
He told aides before landing that he was furious with Mulvaney.
Campaign organizers, though, put on the show his fans came to see.
US President Donald Trump arrives for a ‘Keep America Great’ rally at the Amercian Airlines Center
A tailgate-style ’45 Fest’ outside the arena began at 10:30 a.m. with food trucks, live music and big-screen TV’s showing campaign videos and snippets from Trump rally speeches.
‘We’re going to have a big party out here,’ said campaign deputy communications director Erin Perrine.
The first person in line to get into the rally, a man who flew in from Las Vegas, arrived at 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday, the Dallas Morning News reported.
By midafternoon chants of ‘Dallas loves Trump’ and ‘CNN Sucks’ broke out among the faithful, according to people there, while the president was speaking to employees at the Louis Vuitton workshop.
The factory’s launch is part of what the Trump campaign calls a hiring binge that has created 782,000 jobs in Texas since the president’s inauguration.
Thursday’s fundraising events point to Trump’s strength among moneyed elites in north Texas. The most dominant pro-Trump super PAC collected more from Dallas-based donors in 2016 than from anywhere else.
Members of the audience cheer as President Donald Trump takes the stage at a campaign rally at American Airlines Arena
But Dallas itself is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the surrounding counties are a political mess of purple with an open congressional seat up for grabs next year following Rep. Kenny Marchant’s retirement.
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman, hosted a competing ‘rally against fear’ that he claimed will attract a huge bipartisan crowd.
Held in a space one-third the size of Trump’s, it attracted a reported 4,000 people.
Democrats hope Texas could be in play as a battleground state in 2020 – an unlikely development after similar projections failed to produce a Texas blue wave in 2016.
Democrats haven’t won a statewide political race of any kind in the Lone Star State since 1994. President Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat to win its 38 Electoral College votes, in 1976.
But Trump’s 9-point victory over Hillary Clinton in Texas was the narrowest for a Republican presidential candidate in decades. And demographic changes in America’s fastest-growing state are most pronounced among Hispanics who support Democrats more often than not.
O’Rourke held a crosstown-rival rally in February when the president spoke in his native El Paso. He drew an audience nearly as large as Trump’s, briefly putting his fledgling White House bid into a national conversation full of contrasts and bombast.
Local Democrats held a smallish Anti-Trump rally outside the Dallas arena on Thursday before the president’s trademark stemwinder, steeped in bluster and drenched in exaggeration.
‘We’re going to have a big crowd. Probably more than he has,’ Dallas County Democratic chair Carol Donovan told the Morning News, offering some of her own.