A day after drawing attention to his opponents' missteps in a presidential debate, former President Donald J. Trump returned to the campaign trail on Friday afternoon, strutting onto the stage before a crowd of thousands in a Virginia field and visibly ecstatic as he boasted about his performance.
After giving little unchecked attacks, lies and exaggerations in the face of Biden's halting performance at the debate, Trump used a rally shortly after to double down on his now-familiar argument that Biden is unfit to hold office.
“The question every voter should be asking themselves today is not whether Joe Biden can survive 90 minutes of a debate, but whether America can endure four more years of a cheating Joe Biden in the White House,” Trump said.
Responding to reports that Democrats panicked by the debate and were rushing to remove Biden from the running, Trump said the Democratic Party had no better candidate than his opponent, a longtime rival whom he remains confident he can win despite losing in 2020.
And Trump seemed similarly emboldened by the Supreme Court's ruling Friday that federal prosecutors misused obstruction laws to prosecute some of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn Biden's victory and keep Trump in the White House.
For Trump, the Supreme Court's decision, which was made possible in part by the efforts of justices he appointed, lent credibility to his repeated claims that his supporters, some of whom turned violent, were engaged in a political protest and that they were being unfairly prosecuted simply because they supported him rather than Biden.
Trump told a crowd that gathered in Chesapeake, Virginia, in the summer heat that the court had found that Biden's “Department of Justice wrongfully prosecuted hundreds of Americans who peacefully protested on January 6th.”
The remark drew some of the loudest cheers during Trump's 90-minute speech, and his supporters began chanting “USA” in unison.
Trump has spoken less about his views of January 6 in recent weeks, as he has campaigned in cities that draw black voters, particularly Philadelphia and Detroit. After the debate, he renewed his call to broaden his coalition, saying, “Democrat or Republican, young or old, black or brown or white, we welcome you into our movement.”
Trump, who has made a string of racist rhetoric, has continued to try to win over black and Hispanic voters by claiming, without evidence, that a surge in illegal immigrants crossing the border is taking away “black jobs.” And as he seeks to win over unions in key battleground states, he has appeared to openly court Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, whom he invited to speak at next month's Republican National Convention.
“I hate to name names, but he's a good guy,” Trump said, referring to O'Brien.
But after the debate ended, Trump resumed the strong rhetoric he had slightly tempered in recent weeks, including falsely claiming there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election and portraying Biden as mentally unfit to run the country.
Trump has harshly criticized Biden's leadership, repeatedly slamming his performance in the debate and using it as evidence that four more years of Biden's presidency would point the country in the wrong direction. And speaking in Virginia, a state that hasn't voted for a Republican president since 2004 but where Trump hopes to overturn the administration, he argued that Biden's poor performance in the debate was grounds for electoral removal of Democrats from power.
“It's not enough to just remove Biden from office,” Trump said, as Virginia's Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, looked on. “As we saw yesterday, the entire Democratic Party needs to be removed from office.”
Trump claimed he'd be “very happy” if Vice President Kamala Harris somehow became the nominee because he trailed her in the polls, and insultingly joked that Biden was smart to pick Harris because no one wants her to be president — an attack the Trump campaign made in an ad that ran during the debate.
During the debate, Trump, who agreed to accept the results of the 2024 election only if he deemed them fair, at times appeared to act as if the presidential election was over. He repeatedly used the term “transition period,” which seemed to refer to the period after the election but actually included the months leading up to it.
“We have a five-month transition period and we want our adversaries to know not to mess with us.”
But Mr Trump again repeated his argument that the US is more threatened by “enemies within” – political opponents – than by foreign powers such as China, Russia or North Korea. “With a wise president, foreign powers are not the real enemy,” Mr Trump said.
Trump repeated some of the false claims he made during Thursday's debate, again accusing Democrats of supporting abortion until “after the baby is born.” No state has passed laws allowing it, and Biden did not endorse it during the debate.
And he again claimed Biden allowed migrants to cross the border with Mexico, causing a surge in violent crime, when available statistics show violent crime is declining and there is no evidence of a surge in crime caused by immigrants.
Trump supporters lined up for hours in the heat to hear him speak, and at least three people required medical attention while waiting for the former president to arrive.
Still, the room was filled with jubilation. Before Trump's arrival, several speakers — mostly Republicans who had occupied the Virginia governor's mansion at various times — asked the audience who they thought won the debate.
Unsurprisingly, the most common answer every time was “Trump.”