Trump ignores GOP rivals, rips ‘corrupt’ Biden at rally

Former president Donald Trump treated the Republican nomination as a done deal Saturday at a New Hampshire rally that sharpened his attack on Joe Biden — while barely mentioning his GOP primary rivals.

“As long as Joe Biden is in the White House, the American Dream is dead,” Trump told a raucous crowd of about 5,000 in a hockey arena at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H., five weeks ahead of the Granite State’s first-in-the-nation Republican primary.

Biden, Trump said, is “truly the worst, most incompetent, and most corrupt president in the history of our country” — promising that a second Trump term will “bring our country back from hell.”

The 90-minute speech focused heavily on America’s economic woes and its dire border crisis, which Trump pledged to end “on my first day back in the White House” by terminating “every open borders policy of the Biden administration.”

The massive flow of migrants is “poisoning the blood of our country,” he declared.

Trump also expanded on his previous attacks on Biden as a “threat to democracy.”

“You know, we talk about democracy,” Trump said. “But the whole world is watching the persecution of a political opponent that’s kicking his ass.”

A poll last week found that Trump would defeat Biden by a 4-point margin, 47% to 43%, in a hypothetical rematch — despite the multiple criminal prosecutions that have been filed against him in federal and state courts.

On Saturday, Trump cited Russian President Vladimir Putin to buttress his point.

“Even Vladimir Putin – has anybody ever heard of Vladimir Putin? – of Russia says that Biden’s – and this is a quote — politically motivated ‘persecution of his political rival’ is very good for Russia because it shows the ‘rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,’” Trump said.

The quote, which Putin made in September, echoed Trump’s sentiments on the legitimacy of the cases against him.

Trump holds a huge 48.6 percentage point lead nationally in the 2024 GOP primary in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate — and in New Hampshire has a 27-point edge over former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, his nearest GOP rival there.