After reading from prepared remarks on immigration for 10 minutes, Donald J. Trump used the rest of a news conference to talk about everything else on his mind.
Former President Donald J. Trump began his news conference on Thursday in the lobby of Trump Tower, standing in front of seven American flags. He laid a bound folder down on a lectern and declared that he was going to focus on the southern border, where his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, is headed on Friday.
That lasted about 10 minutes.
Mr. Trump quickly appeared to grow bored with the remarks he read from, and drifted repeatedly toward other topics. He talked about inflation, accused Ms. Harris of lying about working at McDonald’s years ago and nursed his fury over how the ABC News debate moderators handled his face-off with Ms. Harris nearly three weeks ago.
At the beginning of the news conference, Mr. Trump struggled at times to articulate his thoughts or make a point clearly. He stumbled over some words as he read from remarks he had plainly not written. He bootstrapped one thought onto another based on whether the words associated with something else, as opposed to having a clear through line.
After he accused Ms. Harris of ruining San Francisco while she was the district attorney, a recent favorite line of attack, Mr. Trump followed it up with tangents that related loosely to the city of San Francisco as opposed to the reason he was at the lectern.
“And you know, you can go to California, where she ruined San Francisco,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “She destroyed. San Francisco may have been the greatest city in the world, 16, 18 years ago, and now it’s a practically unlivable place. And I hate to say that. I have property in San Francisco. It’s not a good thing to say, but this far supersedes my ownership of property. It’s an unlivable place. It was the best city. Bob Tisch, of Loews, a friend of mine. Great guy. Wonderful man. He was in San Francisco. He was in Chicago. He had big businesses all over, the Tisch family. Bob Tisch used to tell me that he thinks San Francisco is the greatest city in the country. He passed away, quite a while ago. But, and San Francisco probably was. And now it’s not even livable.”
He then criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, knocked Ms. Harris for not saying the phrase “illegal alien,” accused Democrats of a coup, then pointed to reports that Nancy Pelosi’s husband sold Visa stock before the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company as evidence that Ms. Pelosi “should be prosecuted.” He also said Ms. Pelosi should be prosecuted for security lapses at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob overran the building, some of them hunting for Ms. Pelosi.
Then, after having briefly mentioned the attack on the Capitol, he returned to his immigration policy, and listed ways in which he said Ms. Harris had failed the country on the issue.
At another point, reviving his contention that Democrats purposefully encouraged a surge of migrants to cross the border illegally, Mr. Trump said he would enumerate the party’s reasons for doing so. After offering two explanations, he seemed to fail to find a third.
“No. 3, you know what that one is,” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t have to talk about that one.”
The group of Trump employees and supporters gathered in the lobby along one of the barricades that penned in where Mr. Trump spoke appeared to grow restless, with some looking around, as Mr. Trump talked and talked.
Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers want him to focus on the economy almost entirely, given its resonance in polling. But he prefers to discuss immigration. Ms. Harris’s trip gave Mr. Trump that opportunity, and some advisers were pleased he took it.
After about 45 minutes, Mr. Trump then told reporters that he would meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday morning, their first meeting since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Trump was impeached by the House in 2019 on charges stemming from his urging Mr. Zelensky to initiate a corruption investigation into the Biden family ahead of the 2020 election.
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Zelensky, who had appeared in Pennsylvania with Democrats and had criticized Mr. Trump’s running mate, of making “nasty aspersions” about him and for being a “man who refuses to make a deal” to end the war in Ukraine. Mr. Trump has repeatedly insisted he would bring the conflict to a swift close, even as he offered virtually no detail about how he might do so.
Then he took some questions from reporters.
The first was about Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who was charged this week with bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Mr. Trump noted that Mr. Adams has praised him, and used the case to bolster his own effort to discredit the federal investigations Mr. Trump himself is facing. He baselessly asserted that the investigations are politically motivated efforts by the Biden administration.
Insisting that Mr. Adams had probably been indicted because the mayor had criticized the federal government’s response to the city’s migrant crisis, Mr. Trump said, “I wish him well, but I said that he will be indicted because he did that.”
He refused to acknowledge a question asked repeatedly about whether he would pardon Mr. Adams if he became president again.
Then he dodged several questions about whether Ukraine should cede its land to Russia in order to end the bloody incursion that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia first began in 2022. Ms. Harris earlier in the day made a jab at Mr. Trump, arguing that people who would propose Ukraine cede some of its territory to Russia were asking the country to surrender.
“It would have been a lot easier to work out prior to the start,” said Mr. Trump, who has praised Mr. Putin over the years and described the invasion as “smart” when it first occurred.
He answered a question about whether he would rescind his endorsement of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who’s running for governor and who has been linked in a CNN report to making homophobic, racist and antisemitic statements on a pornographic website before he was a candidate. Mr. Trump responded, “I don’t know the situation.”
As he left the lobby, he stopped when someone asked if Ukraine should give up territory.
“We’ll see what happens,” Mr. Trump said.