Trump Defends Debate Performance and Calls for Ending Tax on Overtime

Although it had been billed as an event focused on housing and the economy, former President Donald J. Trump spent much of a meandering speech on Thursday in Tucson, Ariz., venting his grievances over his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.

But when he eventually did turn to the section on economic issues, Mr. Trump made a new proposal as he sought to win the votes of working- and middle-class Americans: He called for eliminating taxes on overtime pay.

“The people who work overtime are among the hardest-working citizens in our country, and for too long, no one in Washington has been looking out for them,” Mr. Trump said. “Those are the people that really work. They’re police officers, nurses, factory workers, construction workers, truck drivers and machine operators.”

Mr. Trump’s speech was his first campaign event since a debate performance on Tuesday night that some of his allies have admitted fell short. Mr. Trump insisted to around 2,000 supporters in Tucson that it was a “monumental victory” for him that rendered the need for a subsequent debate unnecessary.

“Because we’ve done two debates and because they were successful, there will be no third debate,” Mr. Trump said, repeating a declaration he made earlier on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Even as he maintained that he had triumphed, Mr. Trump spent significant time during his speech bashing the debate’s host, ABC News, and its moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis.

Calling Ms. Davis “nasty” and mocking Mr. Muir’s hair, Mr. Trump criticized the moderators for fact-checking him in real time while not doing so for Ms. Harris. He attacked his opponent as having said little of substance and having smiled too often.

And at one point, Mr. Trump responded to negative assessments of his debate performance. “People said that I was angry at the debate,” he said, explaining that he “was angry” over immigration.

Mr. Trump has an inclination to put immigration at the center of most issues, and during the Tucson event, he blamed the surge of migrant crossings under President Biden for the country’s complex housing affordability crisis. He repeated his pledges to bar illegal immigrants from obtaining mortgages, to reduce housing costs by slashing regulation and to lower interest rates, something he would have no direct control over as president.

Making a play to win over suburban voters, Mr. Trump also vowed to protect single-family zoning in the suburbs and prevent “apartment complexes and low-income housing” in residential suburban areas. Some housing economics experts believe that restrictive zoning drives up prices because it limits construction.

Mr. Trump’s new campaign pledge to exempt overtime pay from taxes is one of several broad tax cuts he has promised as he tries to win over key constituencies in battleground states.

Earlier this year, he promised to eliminate taxes on tips for hospitality workers and on Social Security benefits, which on Thursday he framed as a boon for older voters. Ms. Harris has also called for eliminating taxes on tips.

Mr. Trump’s pledges have not been accompanied by formal policy proposals, and at his rallies he has not addressed the reduction in federal revenue that his plans would create. Independent policy experts have previously said that his plans would add trillions to the national debt in the next decade.

“One of our economists said, ‘I think that’s actually going to bring money into our economy,’” Mr. Trump said on Thursday of his overtime proposal, without offering more details.

Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesman, accused Mr. Trump of trying to mislead voters and obscure a record of favoring billionaires and big corporations. “He is desperate and scrambling and saying whatever it takes to try to trick people into voting for him,” Mr. Costello said in a statement.

Much of Mr. Trump’s speech darted between a set of familiar complaints and criticisms. Though border apprehensions have dropped nationwide this year, Mr. Trump continued to stoke fear around immigration, portraying the country, as he has before, as being under attack by immigrants that he described as an invading force of criminals.

“We’re being conquered, and we are being occupied by a foreign element,” he said in Tucson.

Given Arizona’s being a border state, immigration ranks as a top concern for voters there, and Mr. Trump has tried to make the issue central to his campaign. He highlighted the influx of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, blaming them for a wave of crime that officials have denied is taking place. He also broadly and falsely characterized them as “illegal,” though they are in the country legally with authorization to work.

And Mr. Trump once again repeated a debunked claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were abducting pets from residents, though he did not explicitly repeat his claim that they were eating the animals. Mr. Trump and many of his allies have held to the false claim since he made it during the debate. Ahead of his speech on Thursday, Mr. Trump shared a number of digitally generated images of cats supporting him.

Mr. Trump’s event in Tucson was his first stop on a campaign swing through the West Coast. After he spoke, he was scheduled to travel to California for a fund-raiser in Los Angeles on Thursday evening and a news conference at his golf course in nearby Rancho Palos Verdes on Friday morning. He is also set to hold a rally in Las Vegas on Friday night and to attend fund-raisers in Silicon Valley and Utah.

He spoke on Thursday at a musical hall that was named for the singer Linda Ronstadt, who was born and raised in Tucson. That prompted Ms. Ronstadt to release a statement criticizing Mr. Trump, especially his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents.