The CBS News Battleground Tracker indicates that if the election was held today, Hillary Clinton would win 288 electoral votes -- 18 more than she needs to become president.

GOP nominee Donald Trump is working to cut that margin. His campaign traveled from his new hotel near the White House to the battleground state of North Carolina Wednesday.

Throughout a day of hotel fanfare and a bit of swing state campaigning, Trump swore he was winning the race for the White House. But per usual, Trump veered off script, attacking Hillary Clinton’s health, and for the first time, attacking the coalition move to eject ISIS from Mosul, implying he knew more about military maneuvers than anyone.

Trump criticized the coalition’s Iraqi-led assault on Mosul, the last ISIS stronghold in Iraq.



“Boy, oh boy. What a bunch of amateurs,” Trump said.

Retired U.S. Army War College Dean and CBS News military consultant Jeff McCausland said Trump’s ideas about fighting show he “doesn’t know a damn thing about military strategy.”



“Some clown from some institute came out today ‘why is Donald Trump saying that about Mosul?’ Hey folks, I will put my thought process against these people any time,” Trump said.

In an ABC interview, Trump’s know-it-all streak came through.

“Why can’t they win first, and talk later? Why do they have to say three months before the attack we are going in? So, you can tell your military expert that I’ll sit down and I’ll teach him a couple of things,” Trump said.

Trump defended his decision to leave the campaign trail to puff up his new Washington hotel, spinning the criticism to attack Clinton’s stamina.



“She’s home all the time, she take many days off. … She reads her teleprompter, gets in a plane, goes home and starts sleeping for three days,” Trump said.

“She’s a very low-energy person,” he also said.

Trump also fired back at Clinton for her questionable claim that he “relied on undocumented workers to make his project cheaper.”

“I didn’t use one! For two reasons: Number one, I didn’t want to, and number two, I am running for president! Why would I do that?” Trump said.

Trump said he used E-Verify to ensure he didn’t hire any undocumented workers on the D.C. hotel project. But despite all Trump’s bragging about being “on time and under budget,” competitors said Trump overpaid to renovate the Old Post Office building, where room rates -- once the highest in the city -- have been slashed by nearly half.