Defiant Trump: 'I'll Never Leave'

Donald Trump made his first public comments Saturday since his unprecedented indictment on federal charges, and to the surprise of neither his supporters nor critics, he struck a defiant tone. Trump addressed the charges related to his handling of classified documents as he spoke at GOP state conventions in Georgia and North Carolina, and he also gave an interview to Politico:

• Trump told Politico he would stay in the race even if convicted. “I’ll never leave,” he said. “Look, if I would have left, I would have left prior to the original race in 2016. That was a rough one.” He again insisted he did nothing wrong, slammed special counsel Jack Smith and his team as "thugs and "degenerates," and predicted he would not be convicted.
• “Nobody wants to be indicted,” Trump told Politico. “I don’t care that my poll numbers went up by a lot. I don’t want to be indicted. I’ve never been indicted. I went through my whole life, now I get indicted every two months. It’s been political.”
• He sounded similar themes in his speeches in Georgia and North Carolina. "The ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country," he said, per NBC News.
• “They’ve launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people,” Trump said, per the AP. "In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.”
• "This is the final battle," Trump warned, per the New York Times, which notes that he laced the grim warnings with humor: "Every time I fly over a blue state, I get a subpoena."

(More Donald Trump stories.)