Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday spewed crude and vulgar remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania that included an off-colour remark about the size of a famous golfer’s private part and a coarse insult about Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The performance, 17 days before the election in a critical battleground state, added to the impression of the Republican nominee as increasingly unfiltered and undisciplined. It comes as some of Trump’s allies and aides worry that Trump’s temperament and crass style are alienating undecided voters.

It was unclear if the outbursts and insults were an expression of his frustration as the campaign grinds on or of his reflexive desire to entertain his crowds. At her own events on Saturday, Harris called attention to Trump’s temperament and his tendency to “go off script and ramble”.

Trump opened his speech at the airport in Latrobe with 12 minutes of reminiscing about the golfer Arnold Palmer, who grew up in the Western Pennsylvania town and for whom the airport was named.

His monologue culminated in lewd remarks about the size of Palmer’s penis. Moments later, Trump gave the crowd an opportunity to call out a profanity. He went on to use that four-letter word to describe Harris.

“Such a horrible four years,” Trump said, referring to the Biden-Harris administration, as he surveyed the crowd of hundreds of people in front of him. “We had a horrible — think of the — everything they touch turns to —.”

Many in his audience — which was mostly made up of adults but included some children, infants and teenagers — eagerly filled in the blank, shouting, “Shit!”

Minutes later, Trump urged his supporters to vote, telling them that they had to send a crude message to Harris: “We can’t stand you, you’re a shit Vice-President.”

With Election Day nearing, Trump’s advisers billed Saturday’s speech as the start of his efforts to make a closing argument to voters. But the choice to open his rally with a long story about Palmer — one of the few topics Trump spoke about at significant length without veering off on tangents — set a curious tone.

“This is a guy that was all man,” Trump said of Palmer, who died in 2016. “This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my god, that’s unbelievable.’”

As the crowd reacted, Trump chuckled. Later, he said, “I had to tell you the shower part of it because it’s true. What can I tell you? We want to be honest.”

Trump has always enjoyed shocking people, and in addition to cursing volubly, he enjoys talking about sex and men’s and women’s looks.

But in the past, he had refrained, for the most part, from being overtly crude publicly as a candidate or as president. Now, however, as he makes his third run for the White House and has become visibly angrier since Harris joined the race, there has been a notable uptick in such behaviour, especially in the campaign’s final weeks and days.

In rallies, in interviews and on social media, he has seemingly relished deploying off-colour language that politicians shied away from in another era. He has reposted racially and sexually charged insults of Harris on his Truth Social website, and he has done little to dissuade or calm crowds that have chanted profanity about the people with whom he has grievances.

This week, Trump was speaking at a Catholic charity event and standing mere feet from the Archbishop of New York when he swore while insulting Bill de Blasio, the former mayor of New York. “He was a terrible mayor,” Trump said. “I don’t give a shit if this is comedy or not.”

Trump often uses a variation of that word to allude to the four criminal cases against him. “I won’t say it, because I don’t like using the word ‘bullshit’ in front of these beautiful children,” he said in June at an event at a megachurch in Arizona, where the crowd began chanting it in unison, to Trump’s glee.

Trump has often told his crowds the story of a letter he received from Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader, urging him to clean up his language. “I wrote him back,” Trump said on Saturday. “I said, I’m going to try to do that, but actually, the stories won’t be as good. Because you can’t put the same emphasis on it. So tonight, I broke my rule.”

New York Times News Service