'I took a bullet for democracy,’ Trump says while touting his relationships with autocrats around the globe, embracing China's Xi Jinping who 'controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist'

Last week’s Republican National Convention notably downplayed Trump’s persistent lie that the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, was stolen from him.

But when Trump returned to the campaign trail Saturday night he did not hold back.

“The Radical Left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020 and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024,” he said, in just one of his references to voter fraud.

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And the crowd cheered as he called on them to “Fight, fight, fight.

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Beautiful’ note from Xi

Trump again touted his relationships with autocrats around the globe, insisting of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un that getting along had made the United States safer.

“All he wants to do is buy nuclear weapons and make them,” he said of Kim.

“I said, just relax, chill. You’ve got enough. You got, you got so much nuclear weapons, so much, I said, just relax... let’s go to a baseball game.”

He called Hungarian President Viktor Orban a “very powerful leader” and again insisted that, had he been US leader, President Vladimir Putin of Russia would never have invaded Ukraine in 2022.

And he said he received a “beautiful note” after the assassination attempt from President Xi Jinping of China, calling him a “great guy”.

He said he had told reporters that Xi was “a brilliant man. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.”

[Edit typo.]