Trump goes off topic again: Do voters care about economy or Harris' laugh?

Donald Trump sought to recalibrate his presidential comeback bid with a North Carolina rally focused on the economy, but he struggled to stay focused on a topic that voters identify as a top concern.

Trump on Wednesday opened his speech with off-script attacks on the media and aired his grievances over the Democrats swapping Vice President Kamala Harris for President Joe Biden atop their ticket. He referred to San Francisco, where Harris was once the district attorney, as "unlivable" and went after his rival in deeply personal terms, questioning her intelligence and saying she has "the laugh of a crazy person.

You know why she hasn't done an interview? She's not smart. She's not intelligent. And we've gone through enough of that with this guy, crooked Joe," Trump said, using the nickname he often uses for Biden.

Trump said that his aides wanted him to focus on economic concerns but that he was not sure he agreed the economy is the most important issue of the election.

Trump spoke at Harrah's Cherokee Center, an auditorium in downtown Asheville, with his podium flanked by more than a dozen American flags and custom backdrops that read: No tax on Social Security and No tax on tips.

Republicans had been looking for Trump to focus more on the economy than in the scattershot arguments and attacks he has made on Harris since Democrats elevated her as their presidential nominee. Twice in the past week, Trump has virtually bypassed such opportunities, first in an hour-long news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, then in a 2 1/2-hour conversation on the social media platform X with CEO Elon Musk.

When he stayed on script Wednesday, Trump contrasted the current economy with his own presidency, asking, Is anything less expensive under Kamala Harris and Crooked Joe?

Kamala has declared that tackling inflation will be a Day One priority' for her," Trump said. "But Day One for Kamala was three and a half years ago. Why hasn't she done it?

Throughout his speech, Trump ping-ponged between his prepared remarks and familiar attacks -- often deviating from the teleprompter in the middle of explaining a new economic promise when something triggered another thought. He ticked through prepared remarks crisply and quickly. The rest was his more wide-ranging style, punctuated with hand gestures and hyperbole.

More than once, he jumped from a policy contrast with Harris to taking another swipe at her home town of San Francisco. He also noted several times that it was Biden, not Harris, who earned votes from Democratic primary voters. During a section of his speech on energy, he slipped in an apparent dig at Hunter Biden, the president's son. and his laptop from hell.

As soon as Trump had committed in his speech to slashing energy prices by half, at least half within 12 months or a maximum of 18, he hedged, seemingly off script: If it doesn't work out, you'll say, oh well, I voted for him and he still got it down a lot.

The latest attempt to reset his campaign comes in the state that delivered Trump his closest statewide margin of victory four years ago and that is once again expected to be a battleground in 2024. The question for the campaign is whether Trump can stick to a tight frame on the economy, especially to saddle Harris with the fallout of inflation, rather than default to his usual stemwinding and grievances.

The speech comes the same day that the Labor Department reported that year-over-year inflation reached its lowest level in more than three years in July, a potential boon for Harris in the face of Trump's attacks over inflation. Harris plans to be in North Carolina on Friday to release more details of her promise to make building up the middle class ... a defining goal of my presidency.

Trump pledged to sign an executive order directing Cabinet agencies to use every tool and authority at their disposal to bring down prices.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that Americans are more likely to trust Trump over Harris when it comes to handling the economy, but the difference is slight -- 45% for Trump and 38% for Harris.

Some voters who came to hear Trump said they were ready to hear him talk specifics on the economy, not because they don't already trust him but because they want him to expand his appeal against Harris.

He needs to tell people what he's going to do, talk about the issues, said Timothy Vath, a 55-year-old who drove from Greenville, South Carolina. He did what he said he was going to do in his initial term. Talk about how he'd do that again.

Mona Shope, a 60-year-old from nearby Candler, said Trump, despite his own wealth, understands working people and wants what's best for us. A recent retiree from a public community college, Shope said she has a state pension but has picked up part-time work to mitigate against inflation. It's so I can still have vacations and spending money after paying my bills, she said. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing left to save.

In some of his off-script moments, Trump ventured into familiar misrepresentations of fact, including when he mocked wind energy by suggesting people would face power outages when the wind wasn't blowing.

Trump has in recent weeks claimed that "you wouldn't have had inflation" had he been reelected, ignoring the global supply chain interruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 spending boosts that included a massive aid package Trump signed as president, and the global energy price effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The former president has additionally promised an immediate fix to higher prices in another term. His principal policy proposals on that front are an uptick in drilling for oil (US production has reached its highest levels ever under Biden), new tariffs on foreign imports, an extension of his 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire under the next administration, suspending taxes on income from tips and rolling back Biden-era investments in greener energy and infrastructure.

But at Mar-a-Lago, in his talk with Musk, on his own Truth Social platform and at his most recent rallies and other interviews, Trump has overshadowed his own economic agenda. He has falsely accused Harris of misrepresenting her own race and ethnicity. He's slipped back into old attacks on Biden and repeated the lie that his 2020 defeat was due to systemic voter fraud. Most recently, he's started lashing out over the size and enthusiasm of the crowds Harris is drawing on the campaign trail, even falsely claiming a photo of her rally was fabricated with AI.

Those factors have made it difficult for Trump to render a clearer policy contrast with the Democratic ticket, no matter how much his aides push the idea of such a reframing.

A Harris aide said Wednesday that the vice president welcomes any comparison Trump is able to make.

No matter what he says, one thing is certain: Trump has no plan, no vision, and no meaningful interest in helping build up the middle class, communications director Michael Tyler wrote in a campaign memo. Tyler pointed to the economic slowdown of the pandemic and 2017 tax cuts that were tilted to corporations and wealthy individual households, and predicted Trump's proposals on trade, taxation and reversing Biden-era policies would send inflation skyrocketing and cost our economy millions of jobs -- all to benefit the ultra-wealthy and special interests.