(CN) - Seeking to reset his presidential campaign after weeks of bad press and self-inflicted wounds, Donald Trump lambasted his Democratic rival Wednesday morning, describing Hillary Clinton as "the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency."
During a nearly hour-long speech at a hotel he owns in New York's Soho neighborhood, Trump stayed on script and on message, delivering his rebuke of Clinton's life and public career in measured but withering tones.
In a series of broadsides launched at the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Trump repeatedly described Clinton as a failed secretary of state with "blood on her hands" who "thinks it's all about her" and is completely out of step with the American people on a wide range of issues.
But his comments included numerous erroneous statements and outright distortions of Clinton's record and many of his bullet points came from the book "Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich" by Peter Schweizer, a senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News and is affiliated with the conservative Hoover Institution.
The speech, widely viewed as the beginning of a five-month slugfest to election day, also came at a time when Trump appears strangely vulnerable for the standard-bearer of a major political party.
On Monday, Trump fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, hours before a new Federal Elections Commission report showed that the billionaire real estate developer's campaign had just $1.3 million in the bank at the start of June.
Clinton, meanwhile, reported she had $42 million in the bank at the start of the month.
Trump also made a direct appeal to supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, urging them "to join our movement so together we can fix the system for all Americans."
It making his pitch to Sanders people, Trump broadened one of his favorite bromides that the political system is "rigged" and said the rigging extends to the "whole economy."
"It's rigged by big donors who want to keep down wages; it's rigged by big businesses who want to leave our country, fire our workers, and sell their products back into the U.S. with absolutely no consequences for them; it's rigged by bureaucrats who are trapping kids in failing schools; [and] it's rigged against you, the American people," he said.
He also attempted to argue his trade and immigration policies would be more beneficial than Clinton's for blacks and Hispanics, two groups that have overwhelmingly voted for Democrats in recent presidential elections.
But when doing so, he made some of his biggest misstatements regarding Clinton's record.
According to Trump, "Hillary Clinton supported Bill Clinton's disastrous NAFTA, just like she supported China's entrance into the World Trade Organization."
"We've lost nearly one-third of our manufacturing jobs since these two Hillary-backed agreements were signed," Trump claimed.
"The she let China steal hundreds of billions of dollars in our intellectual property - a crime which is continuing to this day," he said. "Hillary Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs, and effectively let China completely rebuild itself."
"In return, Hillary Clinton got rich," Trump claimed.
In reality, while Clinton publicly supported her husband's position on NAFTA, subsequent accounts of the Clinton Administration showed she privately expressed skepticism about the deal before it was signed in 1993.