Former President Donald Trump said during a press conference Thursday at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club that he feels "entitled" to continue his personal attacks on Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, appearing to take great offense to being called "weird" by her campaign.

"I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence. And I think she’ll be a terrible president," the Republican presidential nominee said. "She actually called me weird. And she called [running mate J.D. Vance] and I weird," he added.

His first personal insults against Harris came about 45 minutes into his hour-and-a-half press conference, as he insisted she was widely considered to be a "failed vice president in a failed administration."

"She’s not, she’s not smart. I don’t believe that she loves our country, and we cannot have our country destroyed, because once that happens, it’ll never be able to come back," Trump said.

Trump’s colleagues and advisors have publicly suggested that the GOP’s presidential candidate ease off his personal attacks toward Harris, a reporter noted, asking if he’s considering changing up his campaign strategy.

That led into Trump devoting a 10 minute stretch of his freewheeling press conference to attacking Harris, her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, polling, the justice system and gag orders — before insisting that he stood between Hillary Clinton and prison.

"Everybody said, 'lock her up, lock her up,' and I used to go 'easy, easy,' then we won and I said 'wouldn’t it be terrible…to put the wife of the president, former president of the United States into a prison?" Trump said.

On multiple occasions during the 2016 campaign cycle, Trump said — even to Clinton’s face — that he would ask the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor to "look into [her] situation," later telling a Florida crowd that "she has to go to jail," though he eased up on that after becoming president-elect.

"It’s all crooked politics and really crooked judges," Trump said during his Thursday press conference, as he griped about his legal cases — including those he lost (the New York civil case, the New York felony case) and those still pending (the Georgia election interference case, the federal election interference case) while spiking the football on the federal classified documents case that was dismissed (by federal judge and Trump appointee Aileen Cannon, whom Trump called a "brilliant judge who ruled in my favor"), which is being appealed.

When asked by another reporter about his campaign strategy, and advice from former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley that Republicans should "quit whining" about Harris, Trump said that he believes this is a "different kind of race."

"All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country," Trump said, before boasting that he beat Haley "by legendary numbers" in her home state of South Carolina during the 2024 GOP primary. "I think, relatively to what they’re doing and how radical they are and how, in many ways, how sick they are, I think I’m doing a very calm campaign."

Trump also defended his celebration of Elon Musk firing workers that were seeking to organize, a topic that came up during their chat on X — the social platform previously known as Twitter.

“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk. “I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike and you say, ’That’s OK. You’re all gone.'”

It’s not immediately clear which of Musk’s anti-labor threats Trump was referring to. Musk has previously threated to take away Tesla employee stock options if its workers organized a union , instituted a handful of orally-announced rules intended to cool union organizing with threats of discipline, and fired employees at a Buffalo, N.Y., Tesla factory that announced plans to organize. (The NLRB denied the unfair labor practice charge by the Buffalo employees.) Musk has also been sued in a California court by fired SpaceX workers who alleged sexual harassment, retaliation and a hostile work environment — that case is ongiong.

"I want companies to get workers that are going to love them and work for a wage, it lets the company make a profit so they can go and expand," Trump said, before insisting that Musk let his workers go amid his efforts to move SpaceX and Tesla headquarters from California to Texas. When a reporter followed up, noting that it sounds that Trump was comfortable with someone firing workers who were organizing, Trump doubled down.

"Yeah, they weren't organizing against Elon. He let them go because he was having a lot of problems in California. He was made, they were making it impossible for him in California, what they were doing with the taxes and everything, were making it impossible for him," Trump said.

Trump also alleged that Harris’s expected economic plans — which are said to include a federal ban on "corporate price gouging" on groceries, as well as a series of policies intended to lower housing prices — would tip over what he already calls a "failing economy."

The Harris campaign, in a statement released after the press conference, mocked Trump's news conference as "whatever that was."

“At his country club, Donald Trump, huffed and puffed his opposition to lowering food costs for middle and working class Americans and prescription drug costs for seniors before pivoting back to his usual lies and delusions," the campaign said, alleging that Trump’s economic plans, including tariffs on foreign goods, would raise costs for Americans. "The American people cannot trust a word Donald Trump says, but they can trust Vice President Kamala Harris, who has spent her life taking on fraudsters, cheaters, and criminals like Donald Trump to make our country safer and lower costs for the middle class."

But it wasn’t all personal attacks. Trump at one point appeared to compliment Harris, inadvertently. Shortly after insisting that Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (who Trump refers to as "New-scum,") "destroyed California" and San Francisco. "San Francisco, you know, was a great city 15 years ago," he said.

Fifteen years ago, Newsom and Harris were, respectively, the mayor and district attorney of San Francisco.