NEW YORK - Donald Trump launched a blistering attack Wednesday on Hillary Clinton's record and character, slamming his presidential rival as a "world class liar" who raked in personal profits from her tenure at the State Department. The billionaire businessman claimed, "She gets rich making you poor."

Trump's broadside marked his opening salvo in a general election faceoff with Clinton that has already turned bruising and deeply personal. The presumptive Republican nominee called Clinton the "most corrupt" person to ever run for president and accused her of spreading "death, destruction and terrorism" while serving as the nation's top diplomat.

Trump's tone was pointed yet measured as he ticked through several of Republicans' favorite critiques of Clinton, including her use of private email as secretary of state and her role in responding to the attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya. Several of his claims were inaccurate or exaggerated, including incorrectly saying she wants to spend hundreds of billions to resettle Middle Eastern refugees in the United States.

Wednesday's address came at a pivotal moment for Trump's presidential campaign. The political novice has struggled with the transition to a general election race, getting bogged down by self-created controversies and failing to invest in the staff and infrastructure needed for the fall campaign.

Earlier this week, Trump abruptly fired his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a move widely viewed as an acknowledgment of a need to recalibrate his organization. A new fundraising report released hours after Lewandowski's firing underscored how much ground Trump has to make up: He started June with just $1.3 million in the bank, a stunningly paltry amount for a major party nominee.

Even as Trump blasted Clinton, he returned to some of the core themes that first powered his surprising presidential campaign. He railed against professional politicians and urged Americans to seize an opportunity to shake up a "rigged" system.

"This election will decide whether we're ruled by the people or the politicians," Trump said, standing before a friendly audience in a ballroom at his hotel in New York's SoHo neighborhood.

While he assailed Hillary Clinton in personal terms, Trump did not make any mention of former President Bill Clinton's indiscretions, despite raising those issues earlier in the campaign.

The real estate mogul did make a direct appeal to supporters of Clinton's primary rival Bernie Sanders, reminding voters that the Vermont senator, too, has raised questions about her judgment. Like Trump, Sanders also generated enormous enthusiasm among voters frustrated with Washington.

Turning to his own plans as president, Trump argued that his opposition to a major Asia Pacific trade pact and his hard-line immigration position would be more beneficial than Clinton's for blacks and Hispanics, two groups that have overwhelmingly voted for Democrats in recent presidential elections.

The Republican said Clinton has pledged to "end virtually all immigration enforcement and thus create totally open borders in the United States." While Clinton has called for a pathway to citizenship for millions of people living in the U.S. illegally, she has also called for focusing enforcement on "detaining and deporting those individuals who pose a violent threat to public safety."

Trump frequently referenced sources of information that have been widely questioned, including the book "Clinton Cash" by Peter Schweizer. The book argues Clinton and her husband used the State Department to enrich their family, but it does not provide evidence of direct connections between business dealings by foreign interests, sometimes involving the Clinton Foundation, and decisions by Clinton when she was secretary of state.

An Associated Press review of State Department calendars did show that she opened her office to dozens of influential Democratic party fundraisers, Clinton loyalists and corporate donors to her family's global charity. The AP found no evidence of legal or ethical conflicts in Clinton's meetings.

Trump's remarks came one day after Clinton launched her own blistering attacks on her White House rival. She moved to undercut Trump's argument that his business record would help him create jobs as president, arguing instead that he had been "reckless" with his companies and "shouldn't have his hands on our economy."

FACT CHECK: Trump's distortions on Clinton

TRUMP: "In just four years, Secretary Clinton managed to almost single-handedly destabilize the entire Middle East." He blamed her for an invasion of Libya that "handed the country over to ISIS," for making Iran the dominant Islamic power in the region and for supporting regime change in Syria that led to a bloody civil war. He charged that her "disastrous strategy" of announcing a departure date from Iraq created another opening for ISIS there.

THE FACTS: These statements make only passing acquaintance with reality. There was no U.S. invasion of Libya. Clinton initially opposed but then sought credit for the NATO-led air campaign to help rebels overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. (Trump spoke in support of U.S. intervention at the time.) While the violence destabilized Libya, Islamic State inroads there have been more recent and are largely limited to a small coastal area of the country. Arguments about Iranian domination of the Middle East predate Clinton's tenure, going back a decade to the George W. Bush administration's deposing of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq. While secretary of state, Clinton supported arming Syria's moderate rebels, but the Islamic State group only arrived later.

TRUMP: U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and his staff "made hundreds and hundreds of requests for security. They were desperate. They needed help. Hillary Clinton's State Department refused them all. She started the war that put them in Libya, denied him the security he asked for, then left him there to die."

THE FACTS: Trump greatly exaggerates the security requests, not all of which were denied, and gets the history of U.S.-Libyan relations wrong. The reference to security requests appears to reflect the Republican-led House Select Committee on Benghazi's tally of "requests/concerns" related to the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. For many of those, there's no record of denials. And some security upgrades did occur before the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. Clinton did not start the war in Libya.

TRUMP: "Hillary also wants to spend hundreds of billions to resettle Middle Eastern refugees in the United States, on top of the current record level of immigration."

THE FACTS: The entire U.S. budget for refugee resettlement is less than $1.2 billion a year - and that includes refugees from Cuba, Bhutan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even including the value of all future public benefits they might receive - and excluding their contribution to the country through taxes - Trump's assertion about the cost of resettlement is still baffling.

TRUMP: "Under her plan, we would admit hundreds of thousands of refugees from the most dangerous countries on Earth, with no way to screen who they are, what they are, what they believe, where they come from."

THE FACTS: Clinton has called for the United States to continue to accept refugees, including as many as 65,000 from Syria. But Trump is wrong about Clinton's stance on refugee screening.