Trump criticizes early voting, but urges Pennsylvanians to do so

“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing. It's very simple,” he said of perhaps the biggest prize among the swing states that will likely determine whether Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris wins the White House on Nov. 5.

“Get out and plan to vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person on Election Day,” he said.

Trump reminded the crowd in the western Pennsylvania city of Indiana that early voting in the state will begin in the next two weeks.

“You can start right now, you know that, right? Now we have this nonsense that you can vote 45 days early,” Trump said, again raising doubts about early voting in 2020, when he lost Pennsylvania and the election to Joe Biden.

“I wonder what the hell is going to happen in these 45 (days),” he said. “What happened last time was a disgrace, including here. But we will not allow it to happen again.”

Trump has repeatedly stressed during the campaign that he favors voting the next day. But in order to neutralize the advantage that Democrats had in the last election through early voting, his campaign team encouraged Republicans to cast their votes before Election Day.

– 'Invasion' –

Trump devoted much of his rambling 90-minute speech to immigration, the thorny issue on which his campaign is based, repeating his grim imagery of “murderers” and other “evil” migrants streaming across the border and taking over communities.

“If Kamala Harris wins this election, she will flood Pennsylvania's towns and villages with illegal immigrants from around the world, and Pennsylvania will never be the same again,” he claimed.

“We will stop the invasion of small town Pennsylvania and we will stop the destruction of America.”

Trump portrayed his rival Harris, the current vice president, as the instigator of the refugee crisis, saying she is flying “thousands and thousands of migrants from the most dangerous places on earth” into American communities.

He mentioned Springfield, the Ohio city where he and other Republicans have repeated unfounded and racist claims that Haitian immigrants eat residents' cats and dogs. He also mentioned Charleroi, a Pennsylvania city of 4,000 whose population he falsely claimed had increased 2,000 percent in recent years.

According to US media reports, the city's population has even grown by 700 to 2,000 new immigrants.

Trump also addressed another issue important to Pennsylvania voters: energy and in particular fracking, a form of natural gas extraction that Harris once opposed but now says she supports.

“If anybody here thinks they're going to keep your industry like fracking going, you should go see a psychiatrist right now and have your head examined,” Trump said to cheers.