The Republican said America and Barack Obama are globally loathed, citing frosty relations with Rodrigo Duterte, just hours after criticizing the first lady

Donald Trump has claimed that Barack Obama and the US are loathed around the world, driving countries such as the Philippines into the arms of its adversaries.

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“The world hates our president,” Trump said Friday at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. “The world hates us. You saw what happened with the Philippines after years and years and years; they’re now looking to Russia and China, because they don’t feel good about the weak America.”

Obama cancelled a meeting with Rodrigo Duterte last month after the Philippines’ controversial new president appeared to call him a “son of a whore”. On Thursday Duterte declared “America has lost” and said it was China, the Philippines and Russia against the world. But in Manila on Friday, Duterte said he would not sever ties and it was in his country’s best interests to remain with the US.

The remarks from the Republican presidential nominee on Friday came after comments he made in North Carolina about Michelle Obama, criticizing the first lady for campaigning on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

On Friday night, after Johnstown, Trump held a second event in suburban Pennsylvania as he attempts to become the first Republican to win the state since 1988.

With several battleground states such as Colorado and Virginia safely in the Democratic column, Trump needs to win the Keystone state to have any chance of besting Clinton in November. However, the Democratic nominee currently has a lead of over six points, according to the Real Clear Politics polling aggregate.

Speaking in Newtown, Pennsylvania, in an overheated gym with Astroturf carpeting, Trump, who has long polled strongly in traditionally Democratic areas of western Pennsylvania, pledged to put miners back to work in a white-collar area that is hundreds of miles from the state’s remaining coalmines.

Although he has been making unsubstantiated claims that the election will be rigged due to voter fraud, Trump did not bring up that argument on the campaign trail on Friday. However, it is registering with some of his supporters.

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Walter McHugh, a student at Drexel University who was wearing a “Make America Swole Again” T-shirt, featuring a cartoon Trump lifting weights, said: “I think [elections] have been rigged for a long time.” He thought there would be fraud in November saying “there will be more votes than voters” while also believing polls were biased.

Trump again compared his campaign to the UK referendum to pull out of the EU, saying it would be like “Brexit times five”.

The Republican nominee will give what has been billed as a major policy speech in Gettysburg on Saturday where he will lay out his “closing argument” for voters.

A senior Trump aide defined the choice on a conference call on Friday night as asking the question: “Do we want a country that has a fundamental loyalty to working people or a country with a fundamental loyalty to international capital?”

Another senior Trump aide compared the speech to Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America and contrasted it to the Clinton campaign, which the aide said “are going to sit on their lead, they are going run out the clock”.

Earlier in the day, in North Carolina, Trump had a risky dig at Michelle Obama, arguably Clinton’s most popular and effective surrogate. “His wife – all she wants to do is campaign,” Trump said, adding, “Wasn’t she the one that originally started the statement, ‘if you can’t take care of your home’, right? ‘You can’t take care of the White House and the country’?

Trump was presumably referring to a comment by Michelle Obama in 2008, when she discussed the competing roles of a campaign spouse and of a mother.

“Our view was that, if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House,” she said then. “So we’ve adjusted our schedules to make sure that our girls are first, so while he’s traveling around, I do day trips … I’m home before bedtime.” The comment was interpreted by some at the time as a swipe at Hillary Clinton’s marriage, but the Obama campaign responded that Obama had been discussing her own marriage, not that of the Clintons.

For her part, Hillary Clinton began her remarks at a rally in Cleveland on Friday, with a reprised joke from the previous night’s charity banquet.

“I have now spent 4.5 hours on stage with Donald proving once again I have the stamina to be president,” the she said, drawing laughs and cheers from the 1,600 supporters who gathered at a college gymnasium in Cleveland.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, speaks at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

On Friday, Clinton credited these honest and at turns frank conversations with activists and young leaders for helping to inform her policy agenda to reform the criminal justice system and improve relationships between the police and communities of color.

“All the advocates and activists who have challenged us to think about these issues of race and justice and equality and opportunity in new and powerful ways really deserve our appreciation,” Clinton said.



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“I am going to do everything I can to lift these issues up because one of my hopes for my presidency will be to root out systemic racism and bigotry and discrimination.”

The candidates enter the last lap of the campaign with Clinton well ahead. A Politico/Morning Consult poll shows her at 42% nationally, with Trump on 36%, Libertarian Gary Johnson on 9% and the Green Party’s Jill Stein on 4%. The Real Clear Politics rolling average has her ahead by 6.2 points in a two-way race, 5.8 points in a four-way contest.

Guarding against complacency, the Clinton campaign launched a fresh offensive on Friday with an advert featuring Khizr Khan, whose son, Captain Humayun Khan, an American Muslim, was killed in Iraq in 2004. Khan delivered one of the most memorable speeches of this summer’s Democratic national convention, brandishing a constitution and asking if Trump had read it.



Trump lashed out at the Khan family in response, in what many judged to be one of the biggest blunders of his White House bid.

The minute-long ad shows Khan handling his son’s uniform and holding a US flag and looking at pictures of his son, along with footage of his son being laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. It ends with him tearfully saying: “I want to ask Mr Trump, would my son have a place in your America?”

Finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that September was the best fundraising month for both candidates. Clinton’s team said she raised $154m; Trump said he raised $100m.

Throwing off his previous shoestring operation, Trump spent more in September than in the previous four months put together, splashing out about $70m, including $23m on advertising. But he was outspent again by Clinton, who invested almost $83m, including around $66m on advertising.

Notably, Clinton’s employees claimed on expenses $260 worth of products from the Trump International Hotel in New York: a tie, polo shirt and hat. These were used as props a Clinton campaign digital video highlighting that Trump does not make all of his products in America.