WASHINGTON — In the final push toward Election Day, Donald Trump reflected on the shooting deaths of former congresswoman Liz Cheney as well as journalists covering his rallies, confirmed he would appoint an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist to head the government’s health care apparatus, and declared that mentioning a fictional serial killer proves his genius .

And all this was before he announced at a rally on Sunday that he should remain in office despite his 2020 election loss and the failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

“I shouldn’t have left the day I left,” he said at a rally in Pennsylvania. “Honestly, because we did so well.”

Trump did not elaborate on exactly how this might work. At noon on January 20, 2021, Joe Biden became the new president and commander in chief. If at that moment Trump had chosen to remain in the White House and be arrested, he would have been a trespasser.

Trump’s critics talk about Trump’s later years – he is now 78 – and marked mental decline as the reason he couldn’t deliver a succinct closing message as to why voters should return him to office after all.

“Age and cognitive decline?” A senior Republican adviser offered on condition of anonymity.

“Psychological compensation,” said George Conway, whose ex-wife Kellyanne Conway ran Trump’s final months of the 2016 campaign. George Conway supported Trump in this election before concluding that Trump had made a terrible mistake.

Trump’s campaign has rejected the idea that Trump has lost focus.

“President Trump is the greatest orator in political history, and his patented ‘weaving’ is a perfect way to convey important stories and explain policies,” spokesman Steven Cheung said. “Because the media is too stupid and ignorant to understand and comprehend what is happening in the country, it cannot accurately convey the achievements of President Trump while in office and the pro-American agenda he will implement in his second term.”

Weave is referring to the claim that Trump’s rambling style of speech, in which he jumps from topic to topic and eventually returns to his original thought, demonstrates his great intelligence.

However, Trump’s increasingly erratic campaign rhetoric in the finals of the 2024 campaign stands in stark contrast to his performance eight years ago, when he continued to robotically recite poll-tested themes from his teleprompter several times a day.

Kellyanne Conway spoke often in the final weeks after the release of the Access Hollywood tape about how he persuaded her to stay on message and was heard bragging that his celebrity fame allowed him to grab women by their genitals.

Trump followed that advice, making the same points over and over again night after night: the latest Hillary Clinton emails stolen by Russia and released by Wikileaks; the southern border wall and making Mexico pay for it; bringing back jobs from abroad; combating radical Islam; and remaking unfair trade agreements.

In that final month, Trump cut back on interviews and largely stuck to the script written for him by others, mostly avoiding detours. He even reminded himself out loud once to stay focused.

“We must be nice and cool, we must be nice and cool, right?” Embers in question At a rally on November 2, 2016. “Be important, Donald, stay on the right track. No side marks, Donald. Nice and easy.”

Eight years later, Trump spends most of his hour-and-a-half speeches on these byways.

“Does anyone know when I say mental hospitals and then I say Doctor Hannibal Lecter? They go crazy. They say, oh, that brings up the names… That’s genius. Right. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. There’s no one worse than him. The Silence of the Lambs. That’s another thing.” Who can remember? I have a great memory, but I don’t bring it up too much because they have to bring up Hannibal Lecter. What does it have to do with it? ?” he said at a North Carolina rally on Saturday.

“So I did something for you that I haven’t done in 20 of my speeches. I brought up Doctor Hannibal Lecter and we let him, you watch, watch, these fake people will say again, he has absolutely nothing to do with Hannibal Lecter. You know I did the knitting, right? Knitting. This is genius. You’re talking about Hannibal Lecter, you’re talking about the mental hospital. Hannibal Lecter. You go out, no. There will come a time in life when the braid won’t finish neatly at the bottom and then we can talk. But right now this is pure genius. Hey, I have an uncle, my uncle John, my father’s brother, he’s been at MIT for 41 years, the longest-tenured professor has so many degrees that he didn’t know what to do with them in the most complicated situation. I understand a lot of this stuff, you know, I believe it. So Jack Nicklaus won’t make a bad golfer. Right. You know, that’s how these things work. “It’s just one of those things and something that runs in the family and whatever.”