[ad_1]
Former President Donald J. Trump, talking Friday night time in Minnesota, which he vowed to boycott if he misplaced there in 2020, falsely claimed that he had gained the state twice, including that it was in play for him in 2024.
“I believed we gained it in 2016,” Mr. Trump mentioned throughout a fund-raiser for the state’s Republican Get together in St. Paul, Minn. “I do know we gained it in 2020.”
The final time a Republican presidential candidate gained Minnesota was in 1972, when Richard M. Nixon carried the state.
However, Mr. Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Get together who’s searching for to avenge his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr. 4 years in the past, mentioned that his marketing campaign was including the state to its “official enlargement” of its electoral map.
Mr. Trump’s practically 90-minute look on the get together’s annual Lincoln Reagan dinner was one other deviation from the same old marketing campaign battlegrounds on a day without work from his felony trial in New York. Final Saturday, Mr. Trump held a rally in New Jersey, a state he misplaced by double digits in each 2016 and 2020. Earlier on Friday, his marketing campaign introduced that it will maintain an occasion within the deep blue Bronx subsequent week.
Mr. Trump used his speech in St. Paul to lean right into a narrative that he stood for legislation and order, suggesting that he had performed a important position in quelling the riots within the state after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis law enforcement officials in 2020.
“I saved your metropolis,” Mr. Trump mentioned, including, “In the event you didn’t have me as president, you wouldn’t have Minneapolis at the moment.”
Mr. Trump started his day at the highschool commencement of his youngest son, Barron, in Florida, which the choose presiding over his trial in New York had given him the day without work from court docket to attend. That didn’t cease him from lobbing additional assaults on the choose, Juan M. Merchan, whom he falsely accused of denying his request to be excused.
“You recognize, for some time, the choose mentioned, ‘You’ll be able to’t go to your son’s commencement,’” Mr. Trump mentioned.
Earlier on Friday, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, assailed Mr. Trump over his false claims to an area tv station that he had gained the state in 2020. Mr. Walz, in a web-based broadcast, referred to as Mr. Trump’s falsehoods “an affront to democracy.”
“He misplaced by over seven factors,” Mr. Walz mentioned. “And for him to crow that he thinks he has an opportunity, I remind people, Joe Biden got here nearer in Texas than Donald Trump got here in Minnesota.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump will likely be a headliner once more, on the Nationwide Rifle Affiliation’s annual assembly in Dallas, the ninth time that the previous president, who has pledged to roll again restrictions on weapons, has addressed the group.
Mr. Trump final spoke on the N.R.A.’s conference in 2022, in Houston, whilst different politicians and musical acts had been no-shows within the wake of the bloodbath of 19 kids and two adults at an elementary college a number of days earlier in Uvalde, Texas.
Jazmine Ulloa contributed reporting.
[ad_2]
Source link