President Trump used the first of his five rallies scheduled for Monday, the last day of campaigning before Election Day, to air grievances about polls, the media, the investigation into Russian interference in the election, President Obama and Hillary Clinton, and to say people should only go vote if they’re supporting him.
Speaking to a crowd in Fayetteville, N.C., he mentioned the coronavirus only to mock China and to call on the governor of North Carolina to open the state.
“I wonder what it would have been if all the nonsense wasn’t brought up,” Mr. Trump lamented at the rally, referring to the two-year investigation into possible conspiracy between his campaign and Russian officials. He suggested that everyone in the media, and among his detractors, is “corrupt.”
He called Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, who helped lead some of the House investigations, a “psycho” and said, “I have to put up with it for three years.” He said he had seen “nothing but negative television — every night, every night, every night.” He added, “Then it’s no collusion.”
Then he concocted an imaginary conversation between Mr. Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from California, in which she read a transcript of a call that Mr. Trump had with the president of Ukraine and realized the president was innocent, and then got angry at Mr. Schiff.
Mr. Trump said of his predecessor, Mr. Obama, and of Mrs. Clinton, “These are criminals.”
The media, he said, “should be subject to campaign violations” for coverage that he believes is partial to his opponent. Then he complained about the type of topics that trend on Twitter.
The president complained that the media wasn’t covering questions about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, Hunter, and his business dealings. “How can you have a scandal if nobody’s talking about it?” Mr. Trump said.
At the end of the rally, Mr. Trump said that people should go out and vote. “You have the power to vote, so go out and vote unless you’re going to vote for somebody other than me, in which case, sit it out,” Mr. Trump said. And he spoke of politicians who tell voters to cast ballots regardless of who they’re supporting: “They’re such liars.”
At rally the night before — just after midnight on Monday at the Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport in Florida — Mr. Trump suggested that he might fire Dr. Anthony S. Fauci after Election Day, further escalating the tension between his administration and the nation’s top infectious disease expert as the number of new coronavirus cases in the United States reaches record highs. (Dr. Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has civil service protections, and it would be extremely difficult for the president to have him removed.)
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