LAKELAND, Fla. — On Wednesday, Donald Trump said Paul Ryan made a “sinister deal” to undermine him, charged that the Islamic State would conquer the United States if Hillary Clinton defeats him and vowed to jail Clinton’s lawyers along with their client.

A day after tweeting that the shackles had come off of him, an angry Trump gave Florida voters a taste of what that meant, as polls continue to show him tanking — he’s now tied with Clinton in deep red Utah — and Republican leaders contemplate the recriminations they will face for publicly abandoning their nominee’s sinking ship.


A day after his running mate confronted a supporter who called for a “revolution” to overthrow the government if Trump does not win, the Republican nominee said, “If we don’t win this election, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

In the meantime, Trump is crossing new rhetorical lines, predicting the end of the United States at the hands of ISIL if he does not win on Election Day. “I can tell you this, they are hoping and they are praying — they are hoping and praying that Hillary Clinton becomes president of the United States,” said Trump at his first stop of the day, in Ocala. “Because they’ll take over not only that part of the world, they’ll take over this country, they’ll take over this part of the world. Believe me.”

After refraining earlier in the day from attacking Ryan — who told GOP lawmakers this week that he would not help elect their nominee after the billionaire businessman was caught on video bragging about being able to get away with sexual assault due to his celebrity status — Trump complained in Ocala that the House speaker and other party leaders had abandoned him.

“Already, the Republican nominee has a massive — a massive disadvantage, and especially when you have the leaders not putting their weight behind the people,” said Trump, speaking about himself in the third person. “They’re not putting their weight behind the people.”

Trump was especially miffed that Ryan had not called to congratulate him on Sunday night’s debate, which most scientific polls showed Trump losing.

“Instead of calling me and saying, ‘Congratulations, you did a great job, you absolutely destroyed her in the debate like everybody said,’” Trump said, before trailing off and plugging Pat Buchanan’s assessment that he gave “the single greatest debate performance in the history of presidential politics.” In 2000, Trump called Buchanan a “neo-Nazi.”

“So wouldn’t you think that Paul Ryan would call and say, ‘Good going?’ In front of just about the largest for a second-night debate in the history of the country,” Trump continued. “So, you know, you’d think that they’d say: ‘Great going, Don. Let’s go. Let’s beat this crook. She’s a crook. Let’s beat her. We’ve got to stop it.’”

While Ryan’s abandonment of Trump came days after The Washington Post published the now infamous 2005 video, the Republican nominee said the real motivation for Ryan’s actions remained hidden. “There’s a whole deal going on there,” he said. “I mean, you know, there’s a whole deal going on. We’re going to figure it out. I always figure things out. But there’s a whole sinister deal going on.”

Despite Trump’s insistence that he won Sunday night’s debate, he also railed against the Commission on Presidential Debates. “The head guy used to work for Bill Clinton. I just found this out,” he said in Ocala. Indeed, the bipartisan commission is co-chaired by Clinton’s former White House press secretary Mike McCurry and former Republican National Committee chairman Frank Fahrenkopf. When Trump’s mic briefly stopped working in Lakeland, he joked that it was the commission’s fault.

In response to WikiLeaks’ revelation that Donna Brazile, now interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, obtained planned questions ahead of a town hall in the Democratic primary and fed them to the Clinton campaign, Trump lamented that he couldn’t get the same advantage. “Why can’t Reince feed me information prior to a debate? I’m so angry at the Republicans. I want to be fed information like Hillary gets,” Trump said, apparently joking. “The Republicans are not doing their job. They should be able to get me all of the questions prior to the debate.”

The tenor of Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly dark since its inception, and the focus of his digs at Clinton have shifted from her competence and stamina to charges of corruption and criminal liability. Trump has repeatedly vowed to sic a special prosecutor on Clinton and the FBI in recent weeks. At Sunday’s debate, Trump said that if he were in charge of the legal system, Clinton would be in jail.

On Wednesday, he made his intentions even more explicit. “She deleted the emails,” he said. “She has to go to jail.”

Trump also called for the jailing of Clinton’s lawyers for approving the deletion of emails they deemed non-work-related. “Those representatives within that law firm that did that have to go to jail,” he said in Lakeland. Earlier, in Ocala, he said of Clinton’s lawyers, “They should be implicated because they have committed a crime.”

Despite the efforts of Clinton and her lawyers, Trump expressed a belief that her emails have not been totally lost. “I have a feeling that the NSA has them,” he said. “They don’t want them.”

Trump has had crime on the mind during his Florida swing, repeating at each stop on Tuesday and Wednesday the false claim that “More people are being murdered now than being murdered 45 years.” While the murder rate has increased significantly this year, the spike comes on the heels of decades of dramatic decline, and Trump’s claim is categorically false.

As usual, Trump held forth on a wide range of topics. On trade, he expressed a preference for bilateral deals, because they are simpler than multilateral deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump has vowed to scrap. “We’ll make deals with individual countries,” he said. “Not this big web of complicated stuff.”

He also mocked the NFL for its efforts to limit concussions. "Uh! Uh! A little ding in the head you can't play the rest of the season,” he said.

Through it all, Trump’s bravado was undiminished, and he promised his supporters that the world would hear their voices on Election Day. “The whole world is going to see what’s going to happen to the United States of America,” he said.