A Week After Shooting, Trump Leaves Unity Behind and Returns to Insults and Election Denial

At his first campaign rally since he survived an assassination attempt last week, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday launched a litany of attacks that suggested his call for national unity in the wake of the shooting had faded entirely into the background.

Over the course of an almost two-hour speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., Mr. Trump insulted President Biden’s intelligence repeatedly, calling him “stupid” more than once. He said Vice President Kamala Harris was “crazy” and gleefully jeered the Democratic Party’s infighting over Mr. Biden’s political future.

Even as Mr. Trump made numerous false claims accusing his political opponents of widespread election fraud, he presented the continuing push by some Democrats to replace Mr. Biden on their ticket as an anti-democratic effort.

By contrast, Mr. Trump — who falsely insisted he won the 2020 election and whose effort to overturn it spurred a violent attack on the Capitol that threatened the peaceful transfer of power — presented himself as an almost martyr trying to protect the United States from its downfall.

“They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy,’” Mr. Trump told the crowd of thousands inside the Van Andel Arena. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do with democracy’? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy.”

The line — one of the few additions to a speech that culled from Mr. Trump’s standard rally repertoire — came as Mr. Trump was trying to rebut Democrats’ claims that he was an extremist and distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a potential second term that would overhaul the federal government.