At a subdued speech Thursday in Miami Beach, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump once again hammered Hillary Clinton on tax policy and attempted to drill into prospective voters his credentials as an economy-builder.
It was difficult to measure the reaction of his audience, the nonpartisan National Association of Home Builders.
Trump drew laughs with a comment that Clinton's speeches are, "so short... Go home and go to sleep!"
But he saw little reaction to lines like, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could actually get along with Russia?"
Throughout the speech, Trump painted himself as a builder and businessman who learned his trade while playing "with blocks" at the knee of his father, the real estate developer Fred Trump.
"My father would go and he'd pick up the sawdust and he'd pick up the nails, the extra nails, and he'd pick up the scraps of wood... It was a constant process and he did a beautiful job," Trump said. He continued: "People across the street would build and it would take them longer, and their house wouldn't look as good, and it wouldn't be as well built as my father's houses. And he'd sell and they wouldn't. And then he'd go buy them out. And he'd fix up the house and he'd sell it. Welcome to being a homebuilder, right?"
That story drew applause from the crowd.
Before she heard Trump speak, audience member Terri Carroll said she thought Trump nailed this particular South Florida appearance by choosing the NAHB as his audience.
"It’s awesome that he’s coming to support the National Association of Homebuilders because homebuilding in our country is the cornerstone of a healthy America," she said. But Carroll described herself as voting for Trump "as a vote against Hillary" because she opposes Clinton's pro-abortion rights stance.
Trump also repeated his unsubstantiated claim -- introduced Wednesday night at a speech in Sunrise -- that President Obama is a "founder" of the terrorist group ISIS. He added that ISIS would make Hillary Clinton its "MVP."
"Hillary Clinton wants to tax and regulate our economy to death," he said. "If you were a foreign power looking to weaken America, you couldn’t ask for anything better than Hillary Clinton as your president."
