Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton turn up heat in swing states

By Jenna Johnson and Juliet Eilperin

The Washington Post

NAPLES, Fla. — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton kept up their focus on a handful of critical swing states Monday, enlisting the help of allies in hopes of gaining any edge with voters in the final two weeks of the campaign.

Trump will devote the day to criss-crossing Florida — a state his aides say he must win to keep alive his White House bid — with stops in St. Augustine and Tampa. Meanwhile, the former secretary of state will stump in New Hampshire with liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D, from neighboring Massachusetts.

But in a sign of how Democrats are hoping to capitalize on Trump’s declining poll numbers, both Clinton and her backers — including President Barack Obama — are devoting as much time to lifting up candidates lower down on the ballot as they are to the presidential contest.

Speaking at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in San Diego Sunday night, Obama devoted much of his remarks to blasting Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., as “shameless” for trying to ally himself with the administration in recent weeks.

Issa chaired the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee between January 2011 to January 2015; he’s now in a close race against former Marine Doug Applegate. While Issa launched investigations into issues ranging from the Internal Revenue Service to the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, he recently sent a mailer with a photo of Obama signing legislation into law that provides victims of sexual assault new federal legal protections. The brochure says Issa was “pleased” the president signed the law, which he co-sponsored.

The president told more than 60 donors Sunday that “Issa’s primary contribution to the United States Congress has been to obstruct and to waste taxpayer dollar on trumped-up investigations that have led nowhere. And this is now a guy who, because poll numbers are bad, has sent out brochures with my picture on them touting his cooperation on issues with me.”

“Now, that is the definition of chutzpah,” he said, as the crowd laughed. “Here’s a guy who called my administration perhaps the most corrupt in history — despite the fact that actually we have not had a major scandal in my administration — that, when Trump was suggesting that I wasn’t even born here, said, well, I don’t know, was not sure. We can pull up the quotes.”

San Diego was Obama’s second stop Sunday. Earlier, he campaigned for Clinton and the Democrats’ Senate candidate, Catherine Cortez Masto, in Las Vegas.

Trump, for his part, took the rare step of campaigning Sunday at a rally at the Collier County fairgrounds in rural southwest Florida, just beyond the reach of most cellphone service providers.

Trump has said he plans to campaign as hard as he can because he doesn’t want to look back and regret not holding “one more rally” in a battleground state. But on Sunday evening, he seemed unsure about his original decision to run, suddenly halting from reading a teleprompter speech to ask the audience.

“When I’m president, if companies want to fire their workers and leave — Are you okay? Listen. When I’m president, this is to me, like, this is why I started. Are we glad that I started? Are we happy?” Trump said, as the crowd encouragingly cheered him on. “Well, I’ll let you know on the evening of Nov. 8 whether I’m glad.”

Trump traveled from a luxury hotel to this remote spot in his personal helicopter, passing over the “beautiful Florida Everglades” — which he has promised to “restore and protect” — and spotting gators and water moccasins.

Trump’s first words upon taking the stage about 20 minutes early: “Man, what a crowd. What. A. Crowd. Unbelievable. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen — and look at all of that media and look at all of those antenna trucks, a couple a million a piece.”

He plugged a recent poll from Investors Business Daily that shows him ahead nationally by 2 percentage points. Trump claimed that the publication had “the most accurate poll from the last election and the two elections before that,” an honor that the small Los Angeles-based publication seems to have bestowed upon itself. (RealClearPolitics reports that Clinton is beating Trump nationally by an average of 5.9 percentage points.)

Trump declared that pink “Women for Trump” signs are his favorites. “I’ll tell you what: We’re doing well in the polls but you know, I really think those polls are very inaccurate when it comes to women,” he said. “I think we’re doing better with women than with men, frankly. So, we’re setting records with men, but I want to set records with women … And I can’t tell the men this, but if I could swap, I would swap you out so fast. You have no idea how fast.”

Trump again pitched himself as a former “ultimate insider” who is now an “outsider” and knows how to fix the insider system. “It’s a rigged, broken, corrupt system,” he said. “It’s rigged. It’s broken. It’s corrupt.”

Trump again promised to block all Syrian refugees fleeing a violent civil war from entering the United States: “We’re going to shut that door, and we’re going to shut it tight,” he said.

Trump attacked Clinton in a variety of ways, including this way: “You know, she’s trigger-happy. She looks weak, and she looks ineffective, and you watch her, and you watch her at the end of the debate, where she’s like exhausted. She could hardly make it to her car: ‘Oh, let’s get out. Let’s go,’” Trump said, rocking back and forth like someone who might fall over. “The end of the debate, two of them, she was like exhausted. But she’s trigger-happy, and she wants to start shooting wars in Syria. What the hell are we doing with Syria?” (Note: After the last two debates, Clinton was alert and well enough to take questions from reporters on her campaign plane. Trump left the last two debates without taking any questions from reporters.)

After speaking for about 45 minutes, Trump boarded his helicopter. He circled the fairgrounds, as his supporters snapped photos, then took off into the sunset.

Trump and Clinton’s running mates also plan to be out Monday: GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence is scheduled to appear in Salisbury and Greensboro, N.C., a state that is up for grabs, while Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine will be in Miami and West Palm Beach, Florida.