Trump says he 'shouldn't have left' the White House as he closes campaign with increasingly dark message

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Donald Trump, who said in Pennsylvania on Sunday that he regrets leaving the White House in 2021, is ending the 2024 campaign the way he began it — dishing out a stew of violent, disparaging rhetoric and repeated warnings that he will not accept defeat if it comes.

At a rally in the must-win battleground state, the former president told supporters that he "shouldn’t have left" office after losing the 2020 election; described Democrats as "demonic"; complained about a new poll that shows him no longer leading in Iowa, a state he twice carried; and said he wouldn’t mind if a gunman aiming at him also shot through "the fake news."

Trump spent much of his speech pushing unfounded claims of cheating by Democrats in the 2024 election and sowing doubts about its integrity as polls show him and Vice President Kamala Harris deadlocked nationally. He ranted about alleged election interference this year and lamented his departure from office after losing to Joe Biden four years ago.

"I shouldn’t have left. I mean, honestly, because we did so, we did so well," Trump said during his rally in Lititz as he claimed the US-Mexico border was more secure under his administration.

It was a rare public admission of regret over participating in the peaceful transfer of power after he incited his supporters to violently storm the US Capitol as he tried to subvert the results of the 2020 election that he lost but refused to concede — something Trump is currently facing federal charges over.

Trump, whose voice sounded hoarse throughout his speech, repeatedly railed against the new Iowa survey released Saturday night, which showed no clear leader between him and Harris in the state.

"We got all this crap going on with the press and with fake stuff and fake polls," Trump said, claiming the poll from the Des Moines Register and Mediacom was put out by "one of my enemies."

At one point, the former president, who has been the target of two assassination attempts, suggested he’d be OK with a gunman aiming at him also shooting through the "the fake news."

"I have this piece of glass here. But all we have really over here is the fake news, right? And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news," Trump said. "And I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind."

A Trump campaign spokesman said after the rally that the former president was actually musing about how the press was protecting him.

"President Trump was stating that the media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!" Steven Cheung said in a statement.

Responding to Trump’s comments Sunday, a senior Harris campaign official said in a call with reporters that "for Trump, this election really is all about his own grievances and he’s not focused on the American people."

In his speech, Trump baselessly claimed Democrats are "fighting so hard to steal this damn thing," and that voting machines would be tampered with.

"They spend all this money, all this money on machines, and they’re going to say, we may take an extra 12 days to determine. And what do you think happens during that 12 days? What do you think happens?" Trump said.

The crowd yelled back: "Cheating!"

"These elections have to be, they have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night. Bunch of crooked people, these are crooked people," Trump said.

The former president’s newest round of threats caps off a campaign with one of the darkest, most menacing closing messages in modern American history. In the last few weeks alone, Trump has doubled down on a pledge to use the military to combat the civilian "enemy within" and mused — in the guise of arguing he was the pro-peace candidate — about how former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of his loudest conservative Republican critics, would fare with guns "trained on her face" in a war zone.

This weekend has brought its own slate of bizarre moments. On Sunday, Trump told NBC News that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent post on X about removing fluoride from public water if Trump were to win a second term "sounds OK to me."

"Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me," Trump told NBC. "You know, it’s possible."

And a night earlier in North Carolina, Trump chuckled approvingly at an audience member’s suggestion that Harris worked as a prostitute. After Trump insisted yet again that Harris did not work in a McDonald’s when she was younger, a supporter in Greensboro shouted, "She worked on a corner!"

Trump laughed, paused for a beat, then declared, "This place is amazing."

As the crowd laughed, he added: "Just remember it’s other people saying it, it’s not me."

His response to the crude remark underscored how the rot in American political discourse, a long-running spiral, went into overdrive after Trump’s arrival on the presidential campaign trail in 2015. It’s a contrast from seven years earlier, when a supporter of John McCain said during a campaign event that Barack Obama was lying about his identity, claiming, "He’s an Arab," and the then-GOP nominee took the microphone from her hands, insisting his rival was "a decent family man (and) citizen that just I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues."

Even then, though, Trump was lurking. He would soon emerge as one of the leading proponents of the "birther”"conspiracy theory, a racist narrative that said Obama was not born in the US.

In the run-up to this year’s election, Trump has used the former president’s full name — Barack Hussein Obama — in an attempt to demonize him. He frequently mispronounces Harris’ first name, though he has shown before he knows the proper way to say it, and called her a "sh*t vice president."

At other times, Trump has descended into farce. During a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, last month, he spent some time recalling the late, great golfer Arnold Palmer’s naked body.

"Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women, I love women," Trump said. "This man was strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my God. That’s unbelievable.’"

Trump’s message to — and more often, about — women has also become increasingly bizarre. At a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last week, he told the crowd that his aides had asked him to stop saying he would be the "protector" of American women, in part because they recognized it as inappropriate.

"‘Sir, please don’t say that,’" Trump said he was advised. "Why? I’m president. I want to protect the women of our country. Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not."

Recent polls have shown the former president trailing Harris with female voters by a significant margin across demographic lines. Neither Trump nor his allies have pushed back on the numbers, instead imploring more men to vote.

"Early vote has been disproportionately female," said Charlie Kirk, the leader of a right-wing group that Trump has entrusted with managing much of his ground game. "If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple."

Harris has mostly countered Trump’s bleak offerings with promises to bring an end to the tribal clashes that have defined most of the past decade.

"Our democracy doesn’t require us to agree on everything. That’s not the American way," Harris said during a speech last week from the Ellipse in Washington, DC. "We like a good debate. And the fact that someone disagrees with us, does not make them ‘the enemy from within.’ They are family, neighbors, classmates, coworkers."

"It can be easy to forget a simple truth," she added. "It doesn’t have to be this way."

The vice president has also zeroed in on Trump’s attacks on rivals and detractors, including a persistent insistence he wants to use the power of the federal government to punish them. By contrast, Harris likes to say, she is focused on policy, like a push to restore federal abortion rights following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

"On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list," Harris said in Washington. "When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list full of priorities on what I will get done for the American people."

CNN’s Samantha Waldenberg contributed to this report.