Trump Rails Against His Guilty Verdict, Claiming ‘Sick People’ Are Behind His Prosecution

It was billed as an event where Donald J. Trump would deliver remarks about his criminal conviction.

Instead, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee gave a discursive mini-rally on Friday filled with misleading statements about what had taken place inside a Manhattan courtroom a day earlier and familiar campaign attacks against President Biden and his Democratic allies.

“This is a case where if they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Mr. Trump said of the prosecutors from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who won a conviction against him. “These are bad people. These are in many cases, I believe, sick people.”

Then, he began to go back and forth between the trial and the standard stump speech he uses to broadly portray immigrants crossing the border as violent, mentally ill criminals.

After seven weeks of holding the media’s gaze from the start of jury selection until the reading of his guilty verdict, Mr. Trump on Friday spoke and spoke and spoke in the lobby of Trump Tower, jumping from one topic to another for 33 minutes in front of the photographers and television cameras gathered in a crescent shape around his podium. A few dozen supporters, all of them employees who work in the building, flanked his other side.

Mr. Trump complained about the charges against him and then about his own lawyers, whom he verbally brutalized privately throughout the trial. “Falsification of business records in the first degree — it sounds so bad,” Mr. Trump said. “I said, ‘Wow.’ And even my own lawyers, I get very upset with them, because they don’t say what it is.”