Donald Trump staged his first New York City campaign rally in eight years on Thursday evening and it didn’t take long before his speech turned a little weird.
Reminiscing about his earlier life as a luxury real estate tycoon, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee told the crowd in Crotona Park in the South Bronx: “Some of the greatest days of my business career were at the toughest times but I enjoyed waking up every single morning and going to battle.
“A lot of people say to me today, the toughest business people, people that you know about… ‘Could I ask you a question? How do you do it?’”
Mr Trump continued to pursue this imaginary dialogue, revealing a bizarre question he claimed he always got asked.
“I say, ‘Do what?’” he said.
“‘How do you get up in the morning and put your pants on? Why do you put the pants on?’”
The former president didn’t elaborate on the meaning behind the peculiar anecdote, telling the crowd: “I’ll explain it to you someday.”
Elsewhere in his campaign speech – during a day off from his ongoing hush money trial in Manhattan – Mr Trump told the crowd that he was “hot as a pistol” and said he was “thrilled” to be back campaigning in his native, which he modestly claimed to have “helped build”.
“If a New Yorker can’t save this country, no one can,” he declared.
The former president also made the wildly false claim that his signature US-Mexico border wall was just three weeks away from completion when he left the White House. In reality, only a fraction of the barrier had been erected by January 2021.
The former president also repeatedly resorted to his usual anti-migrant rhetoric, promising a major mass deportation operation and to protect police officers against prosecution should he regain the Oval Office in November.
There were also false claims about his administration’s record on Black unemployment and his ability to prevent atrocities in the Middle East, praise for Hungary’s “strongman” prime minister Viktor Orban and an attack on New York’s subway system as being “worse than a third world country”.
There were even revivals of some of his greatest hits.
A chant of “Lock her up!” broke out briefly among the crowd when Hillary Clinton was mentioned and Mr Trump again invoked the “anti-immigrant” song “The Snake”.
