US President Donald Trump speaks at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex and Expo Center in Harrisburg. Credit:AP "As you may know there's another big gathering taking place tonight in Washington DC," he said from the stage, as the crowd began to boo. "A large group of Hollywood actors" - the crowd booed - "and Washington media" - they booed again - "are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation's capital right now," Trump said. "I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from the Washington swamp, spending my evening with all of you and with a much much larger crowd and much better people." Spending over three months in office seemed to have had no effect on the President's tone, with the speech as stridently adversarial towards the media and the Democrats as it had been during the campaign.

Much of the debate over how to proceed has centred on whether the Democratic Party should try to win back working-class white voters - and whether it can do so. Credit:AP The President singled out cable news networks CNN and MSNBC again as "fake news", prompting the huge audience to chant as one: "CNN sucks! CNN sucks!" "Look at the media back there," Trump said, and the crowd began to scream and boo again, turning towards the international and local media packed in to a fenced-off section in the back of the arena. Donald Trump arrives to speak at the Harrisburg rally. Credit:AP He lashed out too at the "totally failing" New York Times, which was so small it was "starting to look like a comic book" which now occupied an "ugly office building in a crummy location" in Manhattan.

"They write nasty editorials and opeds telling me how I should be handling world events and our country," he said, to yet more boos. Demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue during the People's Climate Movement March in Washington on Saturday. Credit:Bloomberg He alluded to his election adversary, Hillary Clinton, without naming her - "does anybody remember who our opponent was?" he said teasingly - before the crowd broke out into an enthusiastic chant of "Lock her up! Lock her up!". Outside the arena before the rally, hawkers peddled the same anti-Clinton merchandise they had during the election campaign - including one poster of "Killary Rodham Clinton" with her face in the crosshairs of a gun. A new addition to the merchandise, though, were Trump 2020 buttons. A demonstrator dressed as King Trump prepares to swing a golf club at the Earth during the People's Climate Movement March in Washington. Credit:Bloomberg

Among the long list of other grievances cited by the President during the rally were the previous administration ("who gave us mess") and the "one-sided" Paris climate accords, something he said he would be making a "big decision" about in the coming weeks. Earlier that day, tens of thousands of protesters had jammed the nation's capital for the People's Climate March, urging action on climate change. Trump also talked up his achievements over what he said had been "100 days of action" – appointing a new justice to the Supreme Court, withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and ending the "war on beautiful clean coal". He again promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico, despite not yet securing funding from either Mexico or Congress: "If the Democrats knew what the hell they were doing, they would approve it ... obviously they don't mind the illegals pouring in, the drugs pouring in. They don't mind." As he had done on the campaign trail, he did a reading of The Snake. The poem, written and recorded in the 1960s, describes a serpent begging a young woman "take me in" before delivering a "vicious bite". During the campaign, Trump had used it as an allegory warning against the dangers he said were posed by Syrian refugees. On Saturday, he linked it to undocumented immigrants.

"I thought of [the poem] having to do with our borders and people coming in and we know what we're going to have. We're going to have problems," he said. Just before Trump began reading the poem, a group of his supporters surrounded a 30-year-old lawyer and ex-Democratic candidate in the crowd, Neil Makhija, who was watching from the floor of the arena. The men marched him to the edge of the arena and cornered him against a wall right beside the media pen, before eventually walking him to police. "There was someone close by me who had a 'sea levels are rising' sign ... and someone pointed at me and said 'he's one of them too' and they just started coming after me," Makhija told the media afterwards, adding he was told "you don't belong here". The President's dramatic speech featured many of the same nationalistic flourishes as his inauguration speech, when he spoke of ending "American carnage".

On Saturday night, he again told his crowd that "whether we are black or brown or white we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, and we all share the same glorious freedoms of our magnificent country" before repeating his election-winning promise to "make America great again". "We are Americans and the future belongs to us!"