WITH his third straight United States presidential campaign coming down to the wire, Donald Trump mused at a rally about hydrogen-powered cars exploding, lamented how difficult it is to get spray paint off limestone and marvelled at how billionaire backer Elon Musk's rocket had returned to Earth in one piece.
He complained Democratic rival Kamala Harris wasn't working as hard as he was, praised Chinese President Xi Jinping as "fierce" and called former president Barack Obama "a real jerk".
His aides had billed the event in battleground North Carolina as economy-focused, but that issue was just the warm-up.
In the countdown to the Nov 5 election, the former president is campaigning in a way that political commentators say could lose him precious votes against Harris, in what could be one of the tightest contests for the White House in history.
Surveys show the race is so tight that the result could hinge on a few thousand votes in several competitive states.
The Harris campaign is closing its campaign by calling Trump "unstable" and "unhinged". She is increasingly pointing to Trump's ramblings as evidence he isn't fit for the presidency.
Trump defends his scattershot approach by saying he does something he calls "the weave" — in which he claims he always returns to his initial point — and supporters say his unscripted style is part of his appeal.
"His patented weave is a brilliant method to convey important stories and explain policies that will help everyday Americans turn the page from the last four years of Kamala Harris' failures," said Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman.
But with the clock ticking, the former president seems content to burn precious minutes telling stories about his White House days, musing about a dead athlete's private parts size, going where his mind takes him.
"They gave Obama the Nobel Prize," he said on Thursday in Las Vegas.
"He didn't even know why the hell he got it. He still doesn't. He got elected and they announced he's getting the Nobel Prize. I got elected in much bigger, better crazier election but they gave him the Nobel Prize."
Though no rally is ever exactly alike, a consistent theme is Trump's false assertion that in four short years Democrats have transformed the nation into a dystopian state.
He denounces his political opponents as the "enemy from within" and peppers his remarks with graphic accounts of murders and rapes of young women, false tales of violent gangs taking over small towns and debunked claims about immigrants eating stolen pets.
"We're like a garbage can for the world," he bemoaned in Arizona.
During a lengthy interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Trump said there may be life on Mars even though, as Rogan noted, probes have found no evidence.
He also claimed windmills have a negative effect on whales. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.
Trump has adopted a more frenetic campaign schedule with time growing short. Last week, he held events in six of the seven states likely to decide the election.
On Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia, he went on an extended riff about how he averted a trade war with France over champagne. He spoke for so long that many began to leave.
Trump of late has been making headlines in ways that have nothing to do with how he would run the country.
He turned one rally into an impromptu dance party, swaying on stage to his favourite numbers for nearly 40 minutes. He shared a locker-room tale about the purported size of golfer Arnold Palmer's private parts.
John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University, said: "Trump thinks what he says, even if incoherent, appeals to his base.
"If he wanted to expand his coalition, he would not be engaged in random rhetoric."
The event before a crowd of about 7,500 people in Greensboro last week illustrated best how Trump is approaching his final days on the trail.
After talking about the border and restoring US manufacturing, Trump bashed Harris for not campaigning that day and called her weak.
He praised foreign strongmen such as Xi and Russia's Vladimir Putin, and mocked celebrities who had attended Harris' rallies: "These are not stars to me."
*The writer is from Reuters
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times