Trump: Clintons killed Ohio manufacturing

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio – Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump got right to the point Thursday, saying that international trade deals pushed by Democrat Hillary Clinton and her husband had caused the state's economic woes.

"Every time you see a closed factory or a wiped-out community in Ohio, it was essentially caused by the Clintons," Trump said.

Thousands of people packed the candidate's rally in the Champions Center, a dirt-floored pole barn used for horse shows, the scents of manure and hay wafting from adjoining stables. They cheered that and other familiar attacks on Clinton and chanted "Lock her up!" as Trump listed her misdeeds in the handling of classified material on her private email server when she  was secretary of state. He charged that "corruption" in the Justice Department allowed her to escape prosecution.

Ohio, with 18 electoral votes, is a must-win for Trump, and the state's large population of white, blue-collar workers, many of whom feel left behind by the economic recovery, seems tailor-made for his message of an American restoration. Polls show Clinton and Trump in a dead heat here, carried by every Republican who has ever won the presidency.

Trump, in the first of three Ohio rallies Thursday, also jumped on a newly leaked 2011 memo by a longtime aide to the former president showing how the Clintons made millons of dollars personally via an "unorthodox" web of interrelationships between the family charitable foundation and corporate donors. It was stolen by Wikileaks from the personal email account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.

"The more emails Wikileaks releases, the more lines between the Clinton Foundation, the secretary of state's office, and the Clintons' personal finances, they all get blurred," Trump said. He called it a "circle of corruption."

Hillary Clinton supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which President Bill Clinton signed, though she has since been critical of it. She had called the pending Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal with Asian countries the "gold standard" but now opposes it amid a populist uprising on the Democratic Party's left.

One of the biggest blows to Springfield's economy happened before Nafta and the Clinton administration in the 1980s when International Harvester, a maker of trucks and agricultural machinery, collapsed. The town lost other manufacturers, and many blame free trade for that, but it also has since diversified its economy.

Trump was scheduled to visit Toledo and Ashtabula later in the day.