NEW YORK — Donald Trump railed against women who have accused him of sexual assault. He baselessly blamed the Biden-Harris administration for his legal difficulties. He appeared to criticize the physical appearances of some of his accusers. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said of one, later adding that he would “not want to be” involved with another accuser, even as he acknowledged his advisers urged him not to make such a comment.
And those were only some of the ways he veered away from topics voters have said they care most about in what his campaign billed as a “press conference” Friday, with the first ballots to be cast soon in the presidential election. Trump took no questions from the news media.
It was yet another striking strategic choice by the former president, who is in a toss-up race with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls and facing what could be a historic gender gap in November as he struggles to appeal to women voters. After attending oral arguments Friday morning in his appeal of the verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing advice writer E. Jean Carroll decades ago, he went before the cameras and repeatedly impugned his accusers. He dismissed a string of allegations as entirely meritless as he leaned into his core message that he is a victim of political persecution.
In a roughly 49-minute appearance that sometimes verged into a stream-of-consciousness rant that was hard to follow, Trump also reminisced about his early career as a real estate mogul and reality television star. (“I was,” he said, “a celebrity for a long time.”) He lamented his two impeachments, calling them “impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two.” And he mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, at least three times.
“This is the weaponization of justice at a level that nobody’s ever seen in this country before,” Trump said, blaming the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department for his state and federal legal entanglements, even though there is no evidence that the White House has sought to influence any of Trump’s criminal cases. “You see it in Third World countries. You see it in banana republics, but you don’t see it in the United States of America. And it’s a very sad thing. And I think I’m doing a great service by having gone through it.”
For much of the summer in a tight presidential contest, Trump’s advisers have urged him to hew to a more disciplined message — focusing on inflation and immigration, which they see as Harris’s two greatest vulnerabilities. But his Friday morning event showed the limits of what his aides can do to keep him on course.
They have tried for weeks to pull him out of a self-pitying stage, where he was complaining frequently about having to take on Harris and lashing out publicly as he described President Joe Biden’s exit from the race as a coup engineered by Democrats. Over the weekend, several people close to him said they thought he was prepared to focus more on making the case against Harris after Labor Day.
But that was not his approach during Friday’s remarks. He invoked his fame, college basketball coach Bobby Knight, his “love story” with his wife Melania and criticized his own lawyers as they flanked him at the news conference.
More than 40 minutes into it, he pivoted to a semblance of a traditional campaign message, telling reporters: “Let me talk about job numbers because as you know, they just came out and they’re a basic disaster.” He vilified undocumented immigrants as criminals, a frequent theme in his campaign rallies and speeches for years. And he went on to lower expectations for the upcoming Sept. 10 debate with Harris by criticizing ABC News, which is hosting the event, by stating that he’s “going into very hostile territory.”
Trump did have a legal victory on Friday: New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan delayed his sentencing in a case where he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records until after the November election.
The Republican nominee criticized Harris’s very limited exposure to news media questions since becoming the Democratic nominee and suggested his campaign was leading “because the opponent refuses to do an interview because she can’t talk.” Harris has done one television interview since becoming the nominee.
Trump was upset about having to appear in court again on Friday for the Carroll case and also was agitated by the new legal maneuvering by special counsel Jack Smith last week in the election interference case and the classified documents case that he brought against Trump, an adviser said. Like others, the adviser spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. Trump wanted to make his Friday appearance before the news media because he thought the Carroll allegations were resurfacing in the news, which infuriates him.
Smith filed an updated indictment in late August to try to salvage his case against Trump related to the former president’s alleged attempts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory. Smith took those actions to respond to the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling granting presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution. He also is urging an appeals court to reverse U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s dismissal of the case alleging that Trump mishandled classified documents.
In New York, Trump’s attorney Will Scharf accused the Biden administration and its political allies of using the legal system and the courts “to unlawfully, unconstitutionally interfere with President Trump’s core First Amendment right to run for president. That is a right guaranteed to him by the Constitution. That is the right that his political opponents are attempting to strip away from it.”
But Trump also had harsh words for some of his own attorneys during his Friday event. “I have all this legal talent, but legal talent cannot overcome rigged judges,” he said. “And I’m disappointed in my legal talent.”
He has complained for years about Joe Tacopina, the attorney who represented him in the Carroll case, for telling him not to attend the trial. He has also soured at times on Alina Habba, complaining about her performance in court. Habba stood behind him at the New York event.
While many of his lawyers view their work as broadly successful — they postponed almost all the trials until after the election, for example — Trump gets angry almost any time the court issues come up.
Trump advisers have said they want to make the election about inflation and immigration. “If we do that, we win,” one adviser said Wednesday.
While Trump aired his grievances at the New York event, his team was briefing Republican lawmakers about how well the campaign was doing and how their data showed they were going to win. None of his top advisers were with him in New York.