Trump’s Ugly Closing Argument

Never mind that he was in Wisconsin. Never mind that it was perfectly sunny, albeit windy. Former President Donald Trump was going to talk about hurricanes.

It was the 9th minute of a campaign rally yesterday that would stretch to just under two hours, and Trump used it to accuse Vice President Kamala Harris of sending billions of dollars to foreign nations while providing only $750 each to domestic disaster victims — a falsehood that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been working for days to combat.

He then went further still, falsely accusing the White House of playing politics with disaster relief while he did exactly that.

“You know, it’s largely a Republican area so — some people say they did it for that reason, I don’t even think they’re that bad, but they probably — maybe they are,” Trump said in Juneau, Wis., where I had traveled to hear his final pitch to voters, or that day’s version of it, in its entirety.

There are less than 30 days to go before the November election, and Trump’s closing argument, delivered at campaign rallies all over the country, is a slurry of polarizing disinformation, false claims about his opponents cheating in elections, and a series of unfounded personal attacks on Harris that his advisers and outside Republican allies have been urging him for weeks to stop making.

For Trump, it’s a strategy aimed squarely at delighting his base, and it brings to mind the way he careened toward Election Day in 2016.