Former President Donald Trump pulled no punches at his first rally since the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, targeting President Joe Biden, other top Democrats, and the Justice Department in a nearly two-hour speech Saturday evening.
Trump held the “Save America” rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to support his candidates of choice in the state’s November midterm elections: GOP Senate hopeful Dr. Mehmet Oz and state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee. The former president endorsed both in their highly competitive primary races. The rally took place over Labor Day weekend, the unofficial start of the midterm election season. The must-win state is a top battleground that will decide which party controls the Senate.
The 45th president began his speech by going after Biden and the federal agencies involved in the unprecedented search of his Palm Beach, Florida, golf club, which resulted in boxes of classified documents being returned to the National Archives.
TRUMP: JOHN FETTERMAN ‘DRESSES LIKE A TEENAGER GETTING HIGH IN HIS PARENTS BASEMENT’
“There’s only one party that’s waging war on American democracy by censoring free speech, criminalizing dissent. You see that happening,” Trump said early on in his remarks, referencing Democrats. “Disarming law-abiding citizens by issuing lawless mandates and unconstitutional orders, imprisoning political protesters. That’s what they’re doing. Rigging elections, weaponizing the Justice Department and the FBI like never ever before, and raiding and breaking into the homes of their political opponents. I wonder who that could be?”
“Republicans in the MAGA movement are not the ones trying to undermine our democracy. We are the ones trying to save our democracy, very simple,” he continued in reference to Biden’s speech this week describing GOP voters in that wing of the party as “extremists.”
“[There] could be no more vivid example of the very real threats from American freedom than just a few weeks ago, you saw, when we witnessed one of the most shocking abuses of power by any administration in American history. The shameful raid and breaking into my home, Mar-a-Lago, was a travesty of justice. It made a mockery of America’s laws, traditions, and principles before the entire world. The entire world was watching, and they’re shocked. They’re shocked.”
Talking about the specifics of the raid, Trump bemoaned investigators “on a phony pretext, getting permission from a highly political magistrate, who they had picked late in the evening, just days before the break-in that trampled upon my rights and civil liberties.”
He continued by noting that those in the FBI and Justice Department that went after him were the same people who went after Hillary Clinton over her email scandal. He also defended his handling of the documents and accused the FBI of staging the photos taken in his Mar-a-Lago office that were recently released to the public.
“Think of that? Yet now, the same people, the exact same people, are sending the FBI storming through the home of their No. 1 political rival. It’s a disgrace, a disgrace, like possibly never before,” he said. “Our country has never seen anything like, if they talk about documents not being properly stored, we had. They go in and take documents, dump them on the floor, stage a photoshoot, and pretend that I had done it, like I had put them all over the floor.”
Trump has been vocal on his Truth Social platform in the weeks since the raid about his fury over the search of his winter estate and the seizure of documents. Still, Saturday’s comments are his most pointed to date on the matter, which is being litigated in the Florida federal court system.
Federal authorities have defended the Mar-a-Lago search, arguing it was conducted to retrieve boxes of classified documents the 45th president brought to his club after leaving office.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
As for Biden, Trump went to town on the prime-time address the president gave this week casting the “MAGA” wing of the Republican Party as extremists.
“As you know, this week, Joe Biden came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to give the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president,” Trump told the crowd. “Vilifying 75 million citizens, plus another probably 75 to 150 if we want to be accurate about it, as threats to democracy and as enemies of the state. You’re all enemies of the state.”
“He’s an enemy of the state. You want to know that?” he added. “The enemy of the state is him and the group that control him, which is circling around him, ‘Do this, do that, Joe. You’re gonna do this, Joe.'”
