Approximately ten days after being arraigned in a Manhattan court, former President Donald Trump addressed the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) Leadership Forum, where he criticized his opponents for what he perceived as their efforts to prevent him from becoming the Republican presidential candidate in 2024.
“And I am the one that they don’t want to run against. That’s why they’re coming after me like this. If they wanted me to run, they’d say, ‘Oh, he is the most perfect human being we’ve ever seen,’” Trump quipped.
“Instead, they put these monsters in there. They put these radical left, crazy people, and — no, if they wanna — they’re the party of disinformation, remember that,” he cautioned. “What they say, you can usually go the opposite. They say, ‘Oh yeah, we want to run against Trump.’”
“In the meantime, they got 5,000 prosecutors after my a**!” Trump exclaimed to cheers.
I love the guy ???
TRUMP: “They’ve got 5,000 prosecutors after my ass.” pic.twitter.com/j9uzxB27Zm
— I Meme Therefore I Am ?? (@ImMeme0) April 15, 2023
Using a mock voice, Trump noted, “‘We want to run against him so bad, we’re gonna run against him. That’s the guy we want, Trump. By the way, please take him out of politics. Please get him out as fast as you can.’ No, they’re the party of disinformation or misinformation. Nobody knows the difference, but they’re pretty close.”
“It’s no wonder that the far-left crazies are engaging in election interference on an historic scale,” he said, in reference to the indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the grand jury investigation in Georgia seeking to find Trump guilty of attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election result as well as the federal review of the president housing certain classified documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home after leaving office.
To bolster his argument, Trump presented polling data that not only showed him leading likely Republican challengers like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis but also revealed that he had a significant edge over President Joe Biden.
“We’re leading by a lot in Iowa. The farmers can never vote for me. I got China to pay the farmers $28 billion for the damage that they caused. I said, ‘you got to pay,’” Trump said. “And so if you see some of these, I just thought you’d put ’em up — remember the old days I used to always announce polls? Only if they were good, I wouldn’t announce them if they weren’t good. If I had a bad one, I wouldn’t. But when they were good, I used to, I used to drive the opposition crazy.”
“But we’re leading Biden now by a lot, seven points, nine points and a ten point, but seven points in the last Rasmussen poll,” he added.