Explicitly invoking Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Saturday with a vow to restore order and heal a divided nation – as well as to sue the dozen-odd women who have recently accused him of sexual assault.

The speech — alternately billed by his campaign as Trump’s “closing arguments,” his plan for his first 100 days in office and his “Contract with the American voter” — showed glimmers of a populist reformer version of Trump that might have been.


Speaking in front of invited guests at the Eisenhower Complex, four-and-a-half miles from the cemetery where Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, Trump began his speech by pointing to the Great Emancipator as a model for his own campaign. “It is my hope we can look at his example to heal the divisions we are living through right now,” he said.

He also made a change to one of his signature policy proposals. After long promising Mexico would pay for a giant border wall, Trump is now saying the United States will initially pay for the wall and Mexico will be paying its northern neighbor back at a later date. In the speech, the GOP nominee proposed a bill that would have the federal government fund the creation of his border wall “with the full understanding that the country of Mexico will be reimbursing the United States for the full cost of such a wall.”

In the Lincoln-heavy address, Trump channeled another lion of his party, trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt, while vowing to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, reevaluate the merger of NBC and Comcast, and force Amazon to pay more tax.

But the foray into industrial consolidation came sandwiched between his claims that Hilary Clinton should not be allowed to run for the presidency because of her alleged crimes — despite the lack of any laws barring even convicted criminals from seeking the presidency — and his vow to exact revenge on the women who have recently come forward to accuse him of sexual assault.

“All of these liars will be sued after the election is over,” he said, hours before another accuser is slated to go public.

The Clinton campaign pounced on Trump’s threat. “Today, in what was billed as a major closing argument speech, Trump’s major new policy was to promise political and legal retribution against the women who have accused him of groping them,” Hillary for America spokeswoman Christina Reynolds said in a statement.

Standing near the site of where another uprising against Washington was decisively turned back in 1863, Trump vowed to drain the “Washington swamp” and called for a “hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition, exempting military, public safety, and public health.”

Trump also returned to many of his earliest campaign promises, though adding little in the way of detail to answer long-asked questions about them. Trump promised to immediately void of many of President Barack Obama’s executive orders, to begin an immediate mass deportation of "criminal illegal aliens” and to suspend immigration from any “terror-prone region.” (He did not clarify the status of his proposal to indefinitely block all Muslims from entering the country.)

He also promised an immediate suspension of payments to global funds aimed at addressing climate change and an immediate cut off on any federal funding to “sanctuary cities."

Trump’s effort to paint himself as a Lincoln-style uniter and a Teddy Roosevelt-style reformer, however, made multiple detours during Trump's insistence on painting himself as the victim of a “rigged” election and bringing up the sexual assault allegations that cloud his candidacy.

Even if Trump had stuck to seeking the rhetorical heights Lincoln once hit at the setting, the break from the circus-like atmosphere of the campaign would not have lasted long. Later on Saturday, civil rights attorney and Hillary Clinton backer Gloria Allred was set to unveil the 11th woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault in as many days at a press conference in Los Angeles.

And those accusations and Trump’s threat of a countersuit — like his debate-night equivocation on accepting the results of the election, which followed the audio tape in which Trump described his ability to get away with sexual assault, which followed his feuding with former beauty queen Alicia Machado, which followed spats with the parents of a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq as both a Muslim and a Purple Heart recipient, which followed an attack on a federal judge over his Mexican heritage — added another entry in a long string of times Trump stepped on his own attempts to articulate a policy platform by engaging his critics.

Still, he pursued a Lincoln connection through his address, ending it by linking Lincoln’s immortal words to his campaign slogan. “We will once more have a government of, by and for the people,” Trump said. "And importantly we will make America great again. Believe me. Thank you.”

During his second stop of the day in Virginia Beach -- a battleground state where Clinton is leading -- the GOP nominee delivered one of his shortest speeches, at about 30 minutes long.

But Trump stayed mostly on message during the address at Regent University's Library Plaza, hitting hard on immigration.