In a confrontation with China, “we will kick their ass”, Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump has said at a campaign rally, asserting, “We have the greatest military in the world”.

Speaking out against what he asserted was the weakening of respect for the US under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, he said on Sunday, “A report that they issued that if we end up in a war with China, we cannot win. We’re not strong enough”.

“We have the greatest military in the world,” he declared. “You don’t put out reports like that – and it’s not true. We would kick their ass,” he said. Even “assuming that’s true, how stupid are you to put out a report like that,” he said.

He did not say which report he was referring to, but it was likely a report from the Commission on the National Defence Strategy to the Senate Armed Services earlier this year. It said, “The Commission finds that the US military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat” and that “in many ways, China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the US military advantage in the Western Pacific”.

Trump’s strong statement tinged by a colloquial vulgarity was in keeping with his theme of asserting that he would reclaim America’s greatness which he said had been devalued by Biden and Harris.

“If we win, our enemies won’t be laughing anymore,” Trump said The Madison Square Garden was packed to its capacity of about 19,000 about 90 minutes before his campaign rally was to begin, and thousands were left stranded outside after waiting for hours to get in and watched him on giant screens. Inside, whipped to bouts of frenzy, the crowd punctuated his speech with screams of, “USA, USA”, and “Four more years”.

Although most of his nearly 90-minute speech focused on immigration and inflation, he presented himself as the keeper of world order. His 2016 Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton, he said, had warned that he would start World War III, but he was the first president in 82 years not to have launched a foreign military intervention.

He said that if he were the president, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine or Hamas attacked Israel. He said he got along with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and other adversaries. “Ukraine was the apple of his (Putin’s) eye, but I said, Vladimir, don’t go in,” Trump said.

On foreign trade, he reiterated his threat to enact what he called the Trump Reciprocal Tax Act that would impose tariffs of the same amount that countries levied on imports from the US. He said he would make the US companies bring home their manufacturing, creating jobs in the US. Trump promised a “golden age” of prosperity for the US. Attacking Harris as dishonest, he repeated his claim that she had not worked at McDonald’s fast-food restaurant as she had said. He said that his campaign event of working at a Pennsylvania restaurant was longer than any she might have. He asserted that Google CEO Sundar Pichai – “a very smart guy” – had called him about it.

Mangling his first name by pronouncing the U as in sun, Trump said, “I got a call from Sundar … and he said, we’ve had more hits for McDonald’s (story). I think he said (more than) anything we’ve ever had”. (Harris and many sources maintain that she had worked part-time at McDonald’s while she was a student at Howard University in Washington.) Trump praised his vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha, as a highly intelligent person who had topped Yale Law School and said their children would be very smart.

Trump trotted out his well-worn accusations that Harris was a radical Leftist who was trying to hide her past radical statements on immigration and being soft on crime but would bring them back if elected. The media was again his target, calling it “fakers” and “enemy of the people”. The rally was as much entertainment as serious policy discourse. His speech was punctuated by music and videos of crimes by migrants.

For Trump, who was convicted in the city on 32 charges of fraud for trying to hide as business expenses his hush money payments to a porn star who claimed to have had a sexual tryst, and faces sentencing next month, it seemed like a moment of triumph as thousands cheered him on what was once his home turf. “This is the city where I was born and raised, and this is the town that taught me that Americans can do anything,” he said. The former president has moved his official residence from the city to Florida but keeps a penthouse at Trump Towers. His wife, Melania, who introduced him, recalled a rally Trump had held in South Bronx in May. The last time a Republican president campaigned there, it was Ronald Reagan, who turned New York “red”, she said.

Speaking in a city where he won only a paltry 23 per cent of the votes in 2020, Trump who has been accused of divisive rhetoric tried to project a sense of inclusivity. He said he was building the “biggest, broadest coalition in the history of the country”. “We bleed the same blood. we share the same hope. we are one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God,” he said. Although he did not say anything racist, some of his associates who spoke before him did. Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News talk show host, ridiculed Harris, whose mother is Indian, as “a Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ”. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who, Trump said, will head a government efficiency panel, claimed that he would cut $2 trillion from the current federal budget of $6.5 trillion.

–IANS

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