President-elect Donald Trump held his final thank you rally in the rain in Mobile, Ala. Saturday and attacked the press during his speech.
Trump said he wouldn’t take off his suit as it started to rain. “We’ll stay out here. The hell with this suit,” the president-elect said. He then went on to accuse the press of depressing the vote and called New York Times columnist Paul Krugman “demented,” among other attacks.
Trump said the Palm Beach Post lied when it came to their reporting of his Friday night rally in Orlando. “I read the Palm Beach Post today, it said, ‘Donald Trump spoke before hundreds of people,'” Trump told the crowd at Ladd-Peebles Stadium. The president-elect said this was “very, very dishonest” and that there were either 25,000 or 30,000 people at his rally.
He then made fun of an unnamed journalist who predicted Trump would lose. “I remember three weeks before the election one of them, I won’t say his name, said, ‘How is Trump going to lead the rest of his life because this is one of the most devastating defeats he will suffer,'” the president-elect said. He added, “three weeks later we had the single greatest victory in the history of politics.”
Trump went on to say he didn’t want to do interviews in the lead up to the election because the press will take his words out of context. He said an example of this was the criticism towards a recent speech of his where he called supporters “violent.” Trump said that he made the comment in jest and added, “these people are so bad because we can’t have a little humor. ”
The president-elect then went on to recall the events of election night and said, “We had those horrible exit polls. Remember the horrible exit polls coming out?” He added, “They did that to depress the vote.” It is unclear which initial exit polls Trump was referring to. Initial polling from MSNBC showed cracks in Hillary’s coalition.
Trump later spoke about Krugman’s recent tweet that suggested Trump has “incentives” for a terrorist attack to occur. Trump said that a “clown” at the Times wrote that another “World Trade catastrophe” would be good for Trump’s base. “What kind of a ‘demented’ person would say that?” Trump asked.
“I went up to see [Krugman] three weeks ago, I gave it a shot, and I had a great meeting,” Trump said about his recent visit to the Times. “But they’ll never change,” Trump added. “No matter what you do, they’ll never change.”