LAS VEGAS — Former President Donald Trump stood in blazing heat in a Las Vegas park Sunday and directly appealed to working-class voters by promising to eliminate taxes on tips for hospitality workers.
But beyond that proposal, little at Trump’s campaign rally suggested that his new status as a felon had changed his message. And when Trump’s teleprompter apparently stopped working, his speech — which his campaign advisers had billed as focused on issues of local concern to Nevada voters — devolved into familiar stories and riffs.
“I got no teleprompters, and I haven’t from the beginning,” Trump said after speaking for roughly 15 minutes, though his speech included excerpts from prepared remarks that his campaign had provided to reporters. “That probably means we’ll make a better speech now.”
Trump repeatedly voiced his frustration with the lack of a teleprompter, even though he has often boasted of his ability to give long speeches without one.
His remarks, which lasted roughly an hour, felt unfocused as he cycled through well-worn territory, railing against electric vehicles, immigration, the four criminal cases brought against him and President Joe Biden’s physical and mental condition.
Once again, Trump broadly depicted migrants crossing the border illegally as violent criminals or mentally ill people, and then recited “The Snake,” a standby poem he has used since 2016 to expound on the threat he believes immigrants lacking permanent legal status pose to the country.
He continued to revive his unfounded claims of fraud in the 2020 election. And he baselessly insisted Democrats would try to cheat in November, sowing doubt about the general election months before a single vote has been cast.
“Don’t let them cheat,” he told the crowd in Nevada. “You watch that vote and watch it all the way.”
Trump again praised the mob of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “J6 warriors,” suggesting they had legitimate reasons to try to stop Congress from certifying the presidential election and saying that they had somehow been “set up” that day.
“They were warriors, but they’re really, more than anything else, they’re victims of what happened,” Trump said. “All they were doing were protesting a rigged election.”
Trump said next to nothing about his recent conviction on 34 felony charges in New York, but he lamented the four times he was indicted last year as a “disgrace.” Still, a number of people at the rally wore shirts reading “I’m voting for the convicted felon.”
Much as he did at a town-hall-style forum last week in Phoenix, Trump spoke at length about immigration, saying that Biden’s border policies constituted an “all-out war” on Black and Hispanic Americans.
Trump again criticized Biden’s recent executive order meant to deter illegal crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico, calling it “weak,” “ineffective” and garbage, though he used an expletive.
In response, the crowd began chanting the expletive, as his supporters did in Arizona when he used the same description. “This word seems to be catching on a little bit,” Trump said approvingly. (When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., spoke before Trump took the stage, her remarks prompted three identical chants.)
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