OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former President Donald Trump sounded a defiant tone over the weekend during a speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland as he faces a series of court cases, some of which could land him behind bars if he’s convicted.
Trump, who destroyed his only remaining serious GOP challenger, Nikki Haley, in her home state of South Carolina during Saturday’s primary, said he would rather lose his “freedom” than “surrender” to President Joe Biden and his surrogates.
“Biden and his deranged prosecutors, attorney generals, and local district attorneys, are trying to take away my liberty; they’re trying to take it away; they’re trying to steal my liberty. If there’s any shred of justice left, they will fail, and we will win, and so far, we’re doing very nicely. Thank you,” Trump said during his speech in National Harbor.
“But I would rather lose my freedom than surrender to this group of thugs, tyrants, and fascist scoundrels,” he added.
“The more the corrupt establishment tries to stop us, the more you know the day is near at hand when we will break free from their grip. We’re gonna break free very soon,” Trump said.
Trump sounds a defiant tone against Biden and his politicized legal effort to put his opponent in jail — like a communist or a Nazi would do.
"I would rather lose my freedom than surrender to this group of thugs, tyrants, and fascist scoundrels."#Trump2024 pic.twitter.com/z4s0pCJu7M
— USA Features Media (@UsaFeatures) February 26, 2024
During his speech, Trump also said he was paying the price for standing up to the political establishment.
“I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president but as a proud political dissident. I am a dissident,” he noted, adding that an Election Day victory for him would be a day of reckoning for his opponents.
“For hardworking Americans, Nov. 5 will be our new liberation day. But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day; their judgment day,” he said.
“When we win, the curtain closes on their corrupt reign, and the sun rises on a bright new future for America,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
“These are the stakes of this election: Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” he said, calling President Joe Biden’s presidency “an express train barreling toward servitude and to ruin.”
”A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny, and it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell. And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now,” he added.
“Remember ‘The Apprentice’?” Trump asked at one point, referencing the hit TV show he hosted before he left it to run for president in 2016.
“Crooked Joe Biden — you’re fired! Get the hell out of here,” he said.
Trump has been rising in the polls for months now when pitted against his most likely Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, but a new 2024 election forecast is a bombshell for his campaign.
A new analysis from Decision Desk HQ, which cited polls from across the country, predicted that Trump would win more than 300 electoral votes, mostly by flipping a number of states he lost in 2020.
The forecasters believe Trump “will win a total of 312 Electoral votes in November, the biggest number a GOP candidate has received since George H. W. Bush’s 1988 victory when he received 426 votes,” Newsweek reported.
The Decision Desk HQ analysis also noted that Trump is currently on pace to win several swing states, including Arizona and Nevada. Also, as of now, he looks likely to win the “blue wall” of swing states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which he won in 2016.
“Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania all went to Trump by less than a point in 2016 and then flipped back in favor of Biden by very narrow margins in 2020. They proved decisive in both of those elections,” Liberty Vittert, a statistician and Professor of the Practice of Data Science at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a Decision Desk HQ video, Newsweek noted.
