With just three weeks to go until the presidential election, Donald Trump’s campaign has taken a strange turn.
The GOP nominee for president has never been one to play by the political rulebook, but his recent appearances have been especially bizarre: He’s swayed onstage to music instead of taking questions, trashed people he’s also trying to court as voters and spent precious time campaigning in solidly blue states, to name a few.
Here are some of the puzzling things he’s been up to lately in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.
His town hall became a 40-minute musical tribute
During a Pennsylvania town hall Monday night, Trump abruptly said he was done taking questions and wanted to “just listen to music,” directing his staff to play “a couple of real beauties.”
What followed was nearly 40 minutes of Trump singing along, swaying and lightly dancing on stage to a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” along with various hits by Sinead O’Connor, Elvis Presley, Guns N’ Roses and the Village People.
Even Trump appeared confused at times about what was unfolding, remarking after one of the first songs that “there’s nobody leaving” and asked, “What’s going on?” The crowd seemed unsure whether the event was over.
Donald Trump’s town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania took a very odd turn after two rallygoers had medical issues halting the program. Trump decided to stop the town hall questions and told his staff to just play music from his personal playlist. He proceeded to stay on stage listening… pic.twitter.com/kkjixXNzsg
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 15, 2024
He inexplicably disparaged auto workers
Trump’s campaign has been aggressively pursuing support from auto workers in Michigan, the capital of American car manufacturing. But he threw all that out the window Tuesday when he diminished their jobs as simply taking parts “out of a box” and said the work was so easy a child could do it.
“They build everything in Germany, and then they assemble it here. They get away with murder,” Trump claimed during an appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago.
“They take them out of a box, and they assemble them. We could have our child doing it,” he continued.
He rattled off about Virginia when asked about Google
In another odd moment during his Chicago appearance on Tuesday, Trump responded to a question about whether Google should be broken up by saying he hasn’t “gotten over” the Justice Department suing the state of Virginia for removing people from voter rolls.
Then, when the interviewer reminded Trump that the question was about Google, Trump said the tech company “is very bad to me.”
“I called the head of Google the other day and said I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google,” Trump said. “I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google is rigged just like our government is rigged all over the place.”
He canceled a planned appearance on CNBC
Joe Kernen, one of the hosts of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” revealed on air Tuesday that Trump pulled out of an upcoming interview on the show.
Sources familiar with the original plans told The Daily Beast that the interview was supposed to happen later this week, until Trump abruptly canceled. A Trump spokesperson told CNN he canceled due to a scheduling conflict.
This marks the second time this month Trump has skipped out on a major interview. After canceling his appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” he posted several angry rants on social media calling the century-old network “A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY” and demanding its broadcast license be revoked.
He’s been scheduling rallies in solidly blue states
While presidential candidates typically hold most of their rallies in swing states ― a political necessity of the electoral college ― Trump has been scheduling some of his final events of the election in solidly blue states like California, Colorado, Illinois and New York.
His decision to spend any amount of time and resources in states he has no chance of winning has baffled pundits.
He’s even repeatedly insisted that he’s going to flip his home state of New York even though no major polls indicate that. A Republican hasn’t won the state in 40 years.
He’s also been exaggerating crowd sizes at his blue-state events. After holding a rally in California’s Coachella Valley on Saturday, Trump boasted about having 100,000 attendees. While the exact number of attendees is unclear, a permit issued for the event reportedly capped attendance at 15,000.
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