Trump vows to jump-start economy, revive Pa. mining industry

At a campaign stop in Bucks County Friday evening, Donald Trump pushed his economic plans and painted the 2016 election as a turning point.

“Either we win this election, or we lose the country,” he said, calling his plans to remake the country “Brexit times five.”

The Republican candidate also promised to fix Pennsylvania’s roads, steel industry and bring back jobs.

“We’re going to put our miners back to work, folks,” he told the crowd of hundreds at the Newtown Athletic Club.

He spoke for about a half hour, rounding out a day of campaigning that started in Fletcher, a small city in the western mountains of North Carolina, before heading to a rally in Johnston, Pennsylvania, and, finally, Bucks County.

As he began speaking, a line snaked out the door at the fitness center and spa that boasts valet parking and an “outdoor aquatic resort complex” that resembles a water park. Trump began his remarks a half an hour ahead of schedule, disappointing some outside.

A theme of investing in the United States flowed through Trump’s remarks, which consistently pivoted back to promises to reverse the decline of industry in the United States and bring back jobs, from “clean coal” to manufacturing.

“Blacks and Hispanics in inner cities are suffering … there’s no education, no jobs, there’s no safety,” he said, promising to “rebuild” America’s inner cities.

Trump also touted a plan to beef up the Navy, adding 350 ships that will be built in the U.S.

“The Philadelphia Navy Yard is a perfect example” of where they might be built, he said. “I went to school in Philadelphia, I know Philadelphia.”

In addition to pitching his economic plans, Trump promised to stop terrorism, stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership, end the federal Common Core standards to “make education local,” as well as repeal and replace Obamacare.

He also vowed to impose tougher penalties on immigrants who are deported and re-enter the country, to champion the Second Amendment, which he said is “under siege,” and to select originalist nominees for the  Supreme Court.

Throughout his remarks, Trump stayed on message and peppered his language with praise for Pennsylvania and his supporters.

The Republican candidate has slipped in the polls in recent weeks, following the release of a 2005 video by the Washington Post in which Trump described making sexual advances to women without consent. The video prompted several women to come forward with accounts that he sexually assaulted them, and several prominent Republicans have distanced themselves from their nominee.

A Quinnipiac University poll from this week shows his opponent, Hillary Clinton, has a 7-point lead.

Speaking of Clinton, Trump called her “the most corrupt person” to ever run for president, spending a good bit of his 30-minute speech criticizing her use of a personal email server while Secretary of State and accepting speaking fees from state leaders in the Middle East.

Trump has also recently called into question the validity of the U.S. electoral process, saying at a rally in Delaware, Ohio, on Thursday that he would only accept the outcome of the presidential race “if I win.”

In Newtown, he said simply that the system is “rigged,” and blamed the media.