LAS VEGAS – Former President Trump told a large crowd of supporters they should commit suicide rather than vote for Biden in the November election and mused about possible shark attacks in a confused speech in sweltering Las Vegas over the weekend.
Tens of thousands of loyal supporters cheered on Saturday as Trump joked that his White House revenge against President Biden was really just about winning their votes.
“I don’t care about you, I just want your vote,” Trump told rally attendees, complaining that he was “sweating like a dog” in 100-degree heat to solicit their support.
He mentioned the name of a huge Trump fan who boasts of having attended more than 200 of Trump’s MAGA rallies.
“It’s more like suicide than Biden, isn’t it?” he asked to cheers of approval.
With his teleprompter breaking down in the desert heat, Trump went on a long-winded rant about whether it was better to be eaten by sharks or to die by electrocution if you happened to land on a battery-powered boat that was starting to sink.
“You have this enormously powerful battery, and now the battery is underwater and there’s a shark over there,” Trump said, noting that “there have been a lot of shark attacks recently.”
“Do I get electrocuted if the boat sinks…or do I jump the shark?” Trump pondered. “I’ll take a shock every time.”
Trump is hoping to win Nevada and neighboring Arizona back to his side after Biden narrowly won both states in 2020, securing a victory in the Electoral College by a vote of 306 to 232 en route to a relatively solid victory.
Despite advisers advising him to stick to effective lines of attack on the border and inflation, Trump again deviated from the script, praising the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a just protest against what he said was a “rigged election” that Biden won.
“They were fighters, but most of all they are victims,” said Trump, who has promised to pardon the hundreds of extremists convicted of involvement in the attack. “They were simply protesting against a rigged election. What a staging that was.”
Despite Trump’s enigmatic rhetoric, the presidential race remains virtually tied at the national level: Trump is narrowly ahead among all registered voters, while Biden is narrowly ahead among those likely to go to the polls in November.
Trump is reportedly ahead in most swing states, especially in the Sun Belt states such as Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.
Biden’s supporters point out that the president is likely to win re-election if he holds only the so-called #BlueWall states of the Rust Belt, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
