“ ‘You shouldn’t have taken it down,’ ” Mr. Trump recalled telling one of his campaign workers. “I said, ‘Too bad, you should have left it up.’ I would have rather defended it.”

“That’s just a star,” Mr. Trump said repeatedly.

It was a striking display of self-sabotage from a presumptive presidential nominee and underscored the limitations of Mr. Trump’s scattershot approach during the Republican primaries — not to mention how difficult he often makes it for his campaign team to control him.
Mr. Trump called the news media “dishonest” in the rambling and sometimes manic-sounding address, in which he hopscotched from one topic to another.