Trump insults protester who disrupts New Hampshire rally: 'Go home and start exercising. He's got a bigger problem than I do'

'Our movement is built on love,' says president

Donald Trump has launched a mean-spirited attack on a protester who briefly disrupted an election rally, telling him to go home and “start exercising“.

At an event in New Hampshire, the east coast state that provided the president with his first primary victory in the 2016 campaign, Mr Trump doubled down on his insistence that the US was winning the trade war with China.

Running through a list of claims that experts have said are not true, among them the idea that Chinese consumers pay the cost of tariffs imposed on its goods by Washington, Mr Trump claimed American farmers were the “greatest beneficiaries” of the situation. In truth, many farmers say they are suffering as a result of retaliatory tariffs imposed on US products such as soy beans. Meanwhile, it is American consumer who carry the cost of taxes on Chinese items.

On a day when he cheered an apparently unprecedented decision by Israel to refuse permission for Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to visit on a fact-finding trip, the president also insulted a protester who briefly interrupted his address at Manchester’s SNHU Arena.

“That guy has a serious weight problem. Go home and start exercising. That guy is worse than I am,” said the president. “He’ll go back to his home and his mom will say, ‘What did you just do’.”

Almost without skipping a beat, the president continued: “Our movement is built on love.”

By the standard of some of his recent rallies, such as one in North Carolina in July where some of his supporters chanted racist slogans in reference to four Democratic women of colour he said should “go back”, the event in New Hampshire was rather moderate in its atmosphere, and the president appeared somewhat muted.

He tried to inspire some emotion among the crowd by suggesting, that with some of the Democratic presidential candidates also holding events in the state, people had “no choice” but to vote for him.

“We have a bunch of socialists or communists to beat. They’re not far away. Does anybody want to pay a 95 per cent tax,” he said.

With a reference to the failing economy and political chaos in Venezuela, he later added: “A vote for any Democratic candidate is a vote for radical socialism, and the destruction of the American dream.”

Much of what the president said was what has become the essence of his stump speech - a claim that he has strengthened the US military, a brag about his appointment of two conservative justices to the Supreme Court and his touting that the administration has created millions of jobs.

“They’re eating the tariffs, by the way,” Mr Trump said of the tariffs he has imposed on Beijing. “There’s no price increase.”

Warning of policies that would lead to tax increases if a Democratic candidate beat him in November 2020, the president said the markets would have crashed if he had not won in 2016 and would do so again if he were defeated in 2020.

“You have no choice but to vote for me, because your 401(k) would go down the tube. Whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me,” he said.

He also found time to insult several of the leading Democratic contenders, saying he believed former vice president Joe Biden might “limp across” the finish line and win the nomination fight.

“I sort of hope it’s him,” Mr Trump said of Mr Biden. “I don’t mind any of ‘em.”

Additional reporting by Reuters