Former President Donald J. Trump spewed crude and vulgar comments at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, including offensive remarks about a famous golfer’s penis size and crude insults about Vice President Kamala Harris.
The performance, which took place 17 days before the election in a key battleground state, reinforced the impression that the Republican candidates are increasingly unfiltered and undisciplined. The move comes as some of Trump’s allies and aides worry that his temperament and rough-and-tumble attitude are turning off undecided voters.
It’s unclear whether the abuse and insults are an expression of frustration as the campaign continues, or a reflexive desire to entertain the crowd. At her event on Saturday, Harris called attention to Trump’s temperament and tendency to “rambling off-script.”
Trump began his speech at the Latrobe, Pennsylvania, airport with a 12-minute reminiscence about golfer Arnold Palmer, who grew up in the western Pennsylvania town and for whom the airport is named.
His monologue culminated with a lewd remark about the size of Mr. Palmer’s penis. Shortly after, Trump gave the crowd a chance to shout profanities. He went on to use that four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris.
“It’s been a really horrible four years,” Trump said of the Biden-Harris administration, looking out at the crowd of several hundred people gathered in front of him. “We’ve been through horrible things. Think about it. Everything they touch changes.”
His audience, mostly adults but also including children, toddlers, and teenagers, enthusiastically filled in the blanks and yelled, “Fuck!”
Minutes later, Trump urged his supporters to vote and said they needed to send a vile message to Harris: “We can’t stand you, you’re a fucking vice president.”
As Election Day approaches, Trump’s advisers touted Saturday’s speech as the beginning of an effort to make a closing argument to voters. But the choice to open the rally with a long talk about Mr. Palmer, one of the few topics Mr. Trump spoke at length without going off track, created an odd atmosphere.
“This man was a total human being,” Trump said of Palmer, who died in 2016. “This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say that, but he was… When I took a shower with other pros, they came out of there and they were like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it.’
Trump chuckled as the audience responded. Afterwards he said: “We had to talk about the shower part because it’s true. What can we say? We want to be honest.”
Trump has always liked to shock people, and in addition to lashing out, he enjoys talking about sex and the appearance of men and women.
But so far, he has largely refrained from being overtly rough in public, both as a candidate and as president. But since Harris entered the race for the White House for the third time, anger has visibly increased, particularly in the final weeks and days of the campaign. There has been a marked increase in behavior.
At rallies, interviews and social media, he seems to enjoy deploying the kind of off-color rhetoric that politicians in other eras would have shied away from. He has reposted racial and sexual insults on his website, Truth Social, and has attempted to deter or calm crowds who chant profanities at disaffected people. There’s very little to do.
Trump spoke at a Catholic Charities event this week, standing very close to the Archbishop of New York and taking the oath while insulting former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. “He was a terrible mayor,” Trump said. “I don’t care if this is a comedy or not.”
Trump often uses variations of the word to allude to the four criminal cases against him. “I won’t say it, because I don’t like to use the word ‘bullshit’ in front of these beautiful children,” he said at an event at a megachurch in Arizona in June. The audience began chanting these words in unison. To Trump’s delight.
It was one of several comments Trump has made in recent days, including one in La Trobe, in which he acknowledged his profanity-laced remarks could offend. Trump has frequently told crowds about how he received a letter from evangelical leader Franklin Graham urging him to correct his language.
“I wrote him back,” Trump said Saturday. “I said I was going to do that, but the story actually isn’t that good because you can’t give it the same emphasis. So tonight I broke my own rules.”
Many of those attending his rallies reflect his attitude in their attire, wearing shirts, baseball caps, and other vulgar language, many of which are directed at Mr. Harris. .
At Latrobe, Trump eventually moved on to typical campaign themes. At one point, he claimed that his election could usher in “a new golden age for America.”
There were rare moments of optimism in his speech. Trump continued to use dark and sometimes violent rhetoric, primarily about the Biden administration, the U.S. economy and illegal immigration, calling it another military invasion.
