Trump defends Kavanaugh, derides Dems for shameful conduct: ‘Bad things will happen’ if voters stay home

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Trump speaks on Judge Kavanaugh

President Trump calls Judge Kavanaugh one of the 'best legal minds of our time.'

President Trump is once again stumping for GOP congressional candidates and touting his MAGA successes, this time at a Saturday night rally in Wheeling, West Virginia.

“America is winning again, and America is respected again,” Trump said. “We are putting America first, finally.”

He called his win in 2016 “a revolution,” thanks to “the people.”

This latest Trump rally helped mobilize support for GOP candidates including U.S. Senate nominee Patrick Morrisey, the state’s attorney general. Morrisey is challenging the Democratic incumbent, Joe Manchin, who’s facing a tough reelection battle in a state Trump won by 42 percentage points in 2016.

Trump again criticized Manchin for supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival in the 2016 presidential race, as well as for joining all Senate Democrats in voting against substantial tax cuts that Trump signed into law last year.

“Bad things will happen if you sit home,” he said, urging his supporters to get out and vote, and raising the specter of a Democratic Party in control of the levers of government.

Trump accused liberals of ruthless and outrageous tactics to get their way.

Trump said Democrats are the party of crime and open borders, and wish to nudge their politics into socialistic territory so that America might wind up Venezuela, where violence and conflict have sent more than two million people fleeing, and made Venezuela’s inflation and homicide rates among the highest in the world.

The Democratic Party is so far left, “Pocahontas is considered a conservative,” Trump said about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Trump repeatedly has referred to Warren as “Pocahontas,” mocking her claims of a Native American heritage.

“We see this horrible, horrible, radical group of Democrats. You see what’s happening right now,” Trump said at the rally before thousands of supporters.

“And they’re determined to take back power by any means necessary. You see the meanness, the nastiness. They don’t care who they hurt, who they have to run over to get power.”

Case in point, the president said: the ongoing Washington tussle over his nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation has been complicated by a welter of sexual misconduct accusations.

Trump praised his pick, and condemned Democrats for what he called their shameless, disgraceful conduct toward Kavanaugh, who he called “one of the most accomplished legal minds of our time.”

“Thursday, the American people saw the brilliant and really incredible character, quality and courage of our nominee for the United States Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh,” Trump said, referencing the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing attended by the judge and one of his accusers, a California professor named Christine Blasey Ford.

Reading off his fact sheet, Trump applauded West Virginians who are 58 percent in favor of Kavanaugh on the nation’s highest court; he noted 28 percent are opposed.

Trump mocked the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, California’s Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as unconvincingly denying that she leaked the letter in which Ford told her story.

Feinstein has insisted Democrats on the committee weren’t the source of the leak.

Trump last visited West Virginia a month ago for a rally in Charleston, as Pittsburgh's KDKA-TV reported.

The president has maintained popularity in West Virginia, and has visited several times since taking office.

At the same time, he has ratcheted up efforts to help Republicans keep control of the Senate with recent stops in Nevada and Missouri.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.