Donald Trump restarts rallies with list of grievances, insults

Bloomberg

Former President Donald Trump opened his score-settling summer tour with a rally before thousands of supporters in Ohio, returning to his familiar script of grievances, exaggerated claims and support for loyal Republicans.
The gathering outside Cleveland was Trump’s first public event to back candidates he favours for the 2022 midterms and work to unseat the 10 GOP members of Congress who voted to impeach him for his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
In an address that lasted about 90 minutes, Trump said that everything he “set up was going down the tubes” and repeated several times his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, as he
recounted at length the record of his administration, and slammed that of President Joe Biden.
“We won the election twice, and it’s possible we’ll have to win it a third time,” Trump said.
The crowed stood and chanted, “Trump won.
Trump won.” In a litany of false claims about election fraud, most of which were thrown out of numerous courts, Trump said he was “ashamed of the Supreme Court,” to which he nominated three of its nine justices.
The Trump events, including a town hall on the Texas-Mexico border next week and an appearance at a Florida Republican Party Independence Day weekend event, are also an opportunity for him to collect money for future political or legal needs and to raise his profile while he is banned from major social media platforms.
The Ohio event was ostensibly to support former White House aide Max Miller, who spoke before Trump and is running in the 2022 midterms against GOP Representative Anthony Gonzalez, who voted to impeach Trump. The former president attended a fundraiser for Miller before the rally and then briefly brought him back on stage.
Trump called Gonzalez a “sell-out, he’s a fake Republican and a disgrace to this state.”
Miller, in his speech, called Gonzalez “Turncoat Tony.”
The rally was held just west of Gonzalez’s district in Lorain County, once a solidly blue-collar Democratic area that Barack Obama won twice, that Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 131 votes in 2016 and Trump won by more than 3,800 votes last year.
The rally was also a prime campaign opportunity for the Republicans seeking to replace Senator Rob Portman, who’s retiring from Congress in 2022.
All of the Republican primary candidates were in attendance,
including venture capitalist
JD Vance, who is expected to
announce his campaign on Wednesday.