LATROBE, Pa. — Seventeen days from the election, here in arguably the most decisive swing state, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump spent the first 10 minutes of his speech without mentioning politics.
Instead, he delivered a long tribute to Arnold Palmer, the late golfer who was born here and is the namesake of the airport where Trump was speaking. Trump’s soliloquy about Palmer included an account of how other athletes reacted to seeing him in the showers.
“Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,’” Trump said.
“I had to say it,” Trump continued.
At about 10 minutes, the digression about Palmer lasted roughly as long as Vice President Kamala Harris’s entire speech at a get-out-the-vote event earlier Saturday in Detroit. Trump’s speech was filled with asides, abrupt changes of subject and profane and personal attacks.
Trump has expressed frustration with his accelerated campaign schedule and shown impatience with his prepared scripts and advisers encouraging him to stick to issues such as the economy and immigration. Trump had other subjects in mind Saturday and spoke freely about a variety of disconnected themes.
He interrupted his own message about the border to praise Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and discuss the color of billionaire donor and surrogate Elon Musk’s MAGA hat. He also gave a shout-out to legendary center fielder Willie Mays, who died in June, and railed against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). He made up a story about an imaginary cartel leader named Jose Rodriguez using an imaginary phone app to call the U.S. government about smuggling people over the border.
When he finally focused on his opponent in the presidential race, Trump turned vulgar.
“You’re a shit vice president,” he said to cheers. Some in the crowd shouted out, echoing the profanity.
Moments later, Trump asked the crowd about his plane: “How did the flyover look? Good?”
As Trump called Harris a “radical left Marxist,” a woman in the crowd yelled: “She’s a f—ing liar!”
Trump acknowledged the indiscretion while explaining he had received a letter from evangelical leader Franklin Graham encouraging him to refrain from swearing.
“You can’t put the same emphasis,” he said. “So tonight I broke my rule.”
At another point, as Trump criticized the Biden administration, he said: “Everything they touch turns to —”
“S—!” the crowd responded.
Trump frequently meandered during his hour-plus speech. As he railed about Harris replacing President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, he paused and commented on his hair, as he looked at the screen displaying his live speech. “Excuse me, I’m going to recomb my hair, do you mind?” he said. “I’m going to recomb my hair, Mr. Future Senator,” he added, a reference to U.S. Senate candidate David McCormick of Pennsylvania.
Trump started the week spending 39 minutes of a town hall playing music instead of speaking. He has jumped abruptly between topics in recent appearances and on social media. In Latrobe, he compared his proposed tax exemptions to the invention of the paper clip.
Harris on Saturday questioned Trump’s coherence.
“Have you noticed he tends to go off script and ramble?” she said in Georgia. “And generally for the life of him cannot finish a thought. And he has called it ‘the weave.’ But I think we here will call it nonsense.”
The rally also touched on familiar themes for Trump, including his vow to impose “massive tariffs” and his vilification of undocumented immigrants, falsely portraying them as mostly criminals from “insane asylums and mental institutions.”
He disparaged foreigners in inflammatory terms, comparing immigration with an “invasion” and saying he would “liberate” the country. He misrepresented Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics to falsely claim thousands are “on the loose,” and he repeated his pledge to launch a mass, militarized deportation operation modeled on a 1950s program.
Trump at one point returned to the topic of Palmer when favorably remarking on the appearance of his expanded security detail.
“Look, people as far as you can see. They give you a little extra security nowadays. I got more machine guns than I’ve ever seen. Look at these guys,” he remarked.
The crowd began to cheer, “USA!”
“They look like Arnold Palmer. They look like Arnold. Can’t look better than Arnold,” he said.
Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.