Gettysburg // Republican candidate Donald Trump on Saturday vowed to bring change to a “broken system” in Washington as he laid out plans for his first 100 days in office if elected president on November 8.
The billionaire real estate magnate vowed to “drain the swamp in Washington” and replace it “with a new government of, by and for the people” – echoing Abraham Lincoln’s famous 1863 Civil War address in the historic town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
“Change has to come from outside our very broken system,” Mr Trump told several hundred supporters.
“Our campaign represents the kind of change that only arrives once in a lifetime.”
In his 45-minute speech, delivered using prepared remarks instead of in his usual off-the-cuff style, Mr Trump pledged to deliver “at least 25 million jobs in one decade”, tame illegal immigration, impose congressional term limits, renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), repeal president Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform and institute a federal hiring freeze to reduce the number of government employees through attrition.
He also said he would “cancel billions in payments to UN climate change programmes” and use the savings “to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure”.
Mr Trump also listed many of his familiar campaign pledges, such as renegotiating or pulling out of trade deals such as Nafta and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“I am not a politician, and have never wanted to be one,” Mr Trump said. “But when I saw the trouble our country was in, I felt I had to act.”
Mr Trump also defiantly raised personal grievances, describing how he would address them from the White House. Moments after promising Americans that he represented a break from the status quo, he promised to sue a number of women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault, calling them liars.
And he added a new threat to his repeated criticisms of US media companies, which he says cover his campaign unfairly to help Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
“They’re trying desperately to suppress my vote and the voice of the American people,” he said.
“As an example of the power structure I’m fighting, AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”
The deal, valued at more than $80 billlion (Dh294bn) was expected to be approved by the boards of both companies at a meeting on Saturday.
Mr Trump said he would also look at breaking up Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal in 2013.
“Deals like this destroy democracy,” he said.
Although the New York businessman described these plans at least in part as a response to his belief such organisations had treated him unfairly, he argued that less wealthy voters had even greater cause to worry.
“When a simple phone call placed with the biggest newspapers or television networks gets them wall to wall coverage with virtually no fact-checking whatsoever, here is why this is relevant to you,” he said. “If they can fight somebody like me who has unlimited resources to fight back, just look at what they could do to you, your jobs, your security, your education, your health care.”
Mr Trump is trailing Mrs Clinton in most polls, although he has narrowed the gap according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday. Mrs Clinton maintained her commanding lead in the race to win the Electoral College, however, and claim the US presidency, a Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project poll released on Saturday showed.
The Democrat leads Mr Trump in most of the states that he would need should he have a chance to win the minimum 270 votes needed to win. According to the project, Mrs Clinton had a better than 95 per cent chance of winning if the election were held this week. The mostly likely outcome would be 326 votes for Mrs Clinton to 212 for Mr Trump, the poll showed.
* Agence France-Presse and Reuters