ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Donald Trump began and ended his rally here by recognizing a tall man standing in the top row of a packed outdoor amphitheater dressed as Abraham Lincoln, pointing up to the silhouette of “Honest Abe’s” famous stovepipe hat against the afternoon sky.

Between those off-hand comments, bookends of another boisterous rally, Trump tried hard to avoid the grim truth now facing his campaign: Polls put him solidly behind Hillary Clinton and the electoral map is tipping toward a Democratic landslide.


But Trump had a different tale to tell supporters, albeit one that strayed at times into self-contradiction. To Trump, both the polls — including one released this weekend that put Clinton up 11 points nationally — and the media are biased against him. At the same time, Trump tried to argue that he is also winning.

“Just in case you haven’t heard, we’re winning,” Trump told a crowd of roughly 8,000 people.

As he spoke, his own campaign manager acknowledged in a tweet that Trump is currently behind.

With scant surveys offering the validation he found in the polls he so often cited when they showed him winning the Republican primary, Trump referenced just one by name: the survey by Investors Business Daily, which he noted was the “most accurate” poll in 2012. But as he described his positioning in a few swing states, he was only bullish enough to declare that he “is winning” in two.

“We’re winning in Ohio. We’re winning in Iowa,” Trump continued, before ratcheting down his positioning in another swing state, the only one that went red four years ago and where polls now show Clinton narrowly ahead. “We’re doing very well in North Carolina,” he said.

Trump blamed much of his current plight on the media — even as he cited new media reports, which he embellished or stretched to his own conclusions, to argue that Hillary Clinton is unfit to even run for president.

“These thieves and crooks, they're disgraceful,” Trump said, pointing at the press riser halfway up the outdoor auditorium. “Without the dishonesty and deceit of the media, Hillary Clinton would be nothing.”

“The media isn't just against me. They're against all of you. Like Hillary Clinton, they look down on the hardworking people of the country,” Trump continued, telling his supporters that the media has “contempt for people who don't share their elitist views” as angry chants of “tell the truth” rose up from the crowd.

Moments earlier, Trump had been citing a Wall Street Journal report detailing what he termed “shocking revelations” od roughly $675,000 in financial contributions from longtime Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe to help the election campaign of the wife of the deputy director of the FBI who helped oversee the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

“We’ve never had a thing like this in the history of this country,” Trump said, before drawing a conclusion that the Journal story did not.

“She has to be held accountable because she knew that money was being paid,” Trump alleged without any proof that Clinton herself knew of the payments by McAuliffe’s political action committee.

“The fact that she is even allowed to run means our system is rigged,” Trump said.

He made the same assertion at his evening rally before 12,000 people in another outdoor amphitheater in Tampa, where he also picked up on an Associated Press report about rising Obamacare premiums next year.

Again, he exaggerated slightly.

"It's just been announced that Americans are going to experience yet another double digit spike in your premium for Obamacare and it doesn't work," said Trump, not mentioning that the potential 25 percent increases will only affect policies bought on state-based insurance exchanges and that many are offset in part by government subsidies.

At both rallies, Trump also referenced — and wrongly interpreted —another item in the news, an email, publicized by WikiLeaks, in which a Democratic operative asked the campaign’s internal pollster to over-sample Democrats in a survey so to provide more useful feedback about how to better target minority voters.

“WikiLeaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats, a voter suppression technique, and that’s happening to me all the time,” Trump said in St. Augustine even though the email wasn’t sent by Podesta and offered no correlation to current polling of the presidential race.

Podesta did not write anything in the 2008 email chain Trump referenced, in which Tom Matzzie wrote that he would like “Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February” to “maximize what we get out of our media polling.” (If Podesta replied, his response is not included in the emails published by WikiLeaks.)

According to Pew Research Center, oversampling is sometimes used to ensure that there are enough members of a particular subgroup within a population to reduce the margin of error. That nuance, however, was neglected by Trump as he argued — falsely — that the email somehow offered evidence that professional pollsters are biased against him and oversampling Democrats.

“When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I’m leading,” Trump claimed. “But you see these polls, where they’re polling Democrats — ‘How’s Trump doing? Oh, he’s down’ — they’re polling Democrats.”

“In an email, Podesta says that he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling,” Trump stated incorrectly. “It’s called voter suppression because people will say, ‘Oh, gee, Trump’s down.’ Folks, we’re winning. We’re winning. We’re winning.”

To many of his supporters, however, the word of Trump, however fungible it may be, holds more sway than any media attempt to correct it. For more than a year, the former reality TV star has sought to inoculate himself against the media’s fact-checking and the political establishment’s pointed criticism with claims that both entities are inherently corrupt. Although the effects of that approach will likely last beyond Nov. 8, Trump himself did deliver a call to action based on the notion that Election Day is his supporters’ last chance.

“The fact that the Washington establishment has tried so hard to stop our campaign is more proof that our campaign is the kind of opportunity for change that only arrives once in a lifetime,” he said.

By evening, he painted in even starker terms.

"This is our last chance," he said before a raucous crowd in Tampa. "In four years, it's not going to happen. This is it."

Nolan D. McCaskill contributed to this report.