Trump rants, resurfaces sexual assault allegations for 49 unfocused minutes

'Very troubled' Trump has become 'hyper-aware' he's making less sense.

The Republican nominee spoke in an appearance billed as a ‘press conference’ that sometimes verged into a stream of consciousness that was hard to follow. He took no questions.

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 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.”

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.

Donald Trump's recent admission that his speeches and answers to questions are larded with digressions and off-ramps into odd and often irrelevant anecdotes is a sign that he knows that he is slipping mentally, suggests one of his biographers who has known him for years.

In a column for the Guardian, Chris McGreal wrote that Trump's excuse at a speech that he "weaves" stories together to make a greater point should raise suspicions that he is— as McGreal put it — "losing it."

Noting the former president, who is making a third bid for the Oval Office, recently proclaimed, "I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’” the Guardian columnist turned to Trump biographer Tim O'Brien for his opinion on what is really at play.

“The reason he’s now offering these convoluted explanations of his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he’s hyper-aware that people have noted that he’s making even less sense than he used to,” O'Brien explained. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate.”

He then added, "He’s a serial liar and a serial fabulist. So much of that comes out that by the time you start to fact-check a statement or a tale, eight others have already landed. I don’t think it’s strategic, I just think it’s Trump being Trump. It protects him from greater accountability because it wears people down trying to keep up with him."

Jennifer Mercieca, of Texas A&M and author of 'Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,' suggested the former president may believe he thinks it's a good way to connect with his base.

“He sees himself as someone who is unscripted and not teleprompted, and a freewheeling conversationalist. He wants to be able to feed off the crowd. Another part of it is that his brain is not well-disciplined and it might also just be that he’s unable to maintain a thought and carry it through to his logical conclusion,” she stated.

"He’s had a lot of criticism lately for rambling, for being low energy during his rallies, for failing to read the teleprompter properly, mispronouncing words and so his response is to spin it. He says, ‘I have experts, these friends of mine, unnamed others, who are very impressed with my ability to weave,’” she suggested.

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. One of his top advisers told the lawmakers on a call that it was important to stay focused, and Trump would win if the campaign stayed focused. None of his top advisers were with him in New York.