If you ask the former president, America is in ruins. “We no longer have a border. Our country is being invaded. It’s an invasion by millions of illegal aliens,” Donald Trump said at his Saturday night rally, using the Great Replacement Theory’s racist “invasion” language, favored by violent white nationalists. “The economy is crashing. Your 401(k) is collapsing,” Trump told the crowd. “Shooting, stabbings, rapes, carjackings are skyrocketing.”
Trump delivered his speech, which started 45 minutes late, byspewing hate to an enthusiastic crowd in Youngstown, Ohio. Trump is in the state to campaign for Senate candidate J.D. Vance, who he endorsed and whose campaign recently required an urgent cash bailout. “J.D. is kissing my ass,” Trump said. “He wants my support so bad!”
But, per usual, Trump spent more time talking about himself and positioning himself as a victim of an “unhinged persecution” than building up the candidates he is there to support. He complained that Jan. 6 witnesses are compelled to turn on him. “They take good people and they say, ‘You’re going to jail for 10 years … unless you say something bad about Trump. In which case you won’t have to go to jail,’” he said. And Trump whined that he left a “very luxurious and enjoyable life” to enter politics.
Trump later pulled out another of his favorite talking points, painting himself as the victim of government spying. “They spied on my campaign. And nobody wants to do anything about it. Can you imagine if I spied on the campaign of — forget Biden — how about Obama’s campaign? Can you imagine what [the penalty] would be? Maybe it would be death. They’d bring back the death penalty,” Trump said. Later, Trump endorsed punishing drug dealers and human traffickers with the death penalty.
The former president also complained that Biden released crude from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve to reduce gas prices, claiming it is used “only for war” and apparently forgetting that he himself once tapped into the strategic reserve for the exact same reason.
“I don’t know if we’ve had a more radicalized or dangerous time in our country,” Trump said. Returning to his argument that America is falling apart, the former president zealously recited the details of gruesome crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. The hate continued when Trump mocked trans women in sports.
Before Trump’s speech, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) helped warm the crowd up and declared him the “one true leader” of the GOP. “The future under Republicans… loyally follows the one true leader of the Republican Party and you know who that is,” she said before injecting election fraud lies. “He’s the one we elected in 2016 and the one we re-elected in 2020, who won the election.” Fresh off appearing to kick a climate activist on video (she denies this), Greene scoffed at Democrats’ concerns about climate change. “We know that cheap gas won’t last,” she told the crowd. “You want to know why? Democrats worship the climate. We worship God.”
Trump bashed the Green New Deal as well, calling it “destructive” and “bullshit.” “I can’t think of a word that describes it better,” he said.
Also in the pre-Trump lineup: GOP congressional candidate J.R. Majewski, who has bragged that he was at the “base of the Capitol building” on Jan. 6 but claims he “committed no crimes” and “broke no police barriers.” Majewski in his speech said “my pronouns are patriot ass kicker” and promised to “turn that Green New Deal brown, like the turd it is.”
MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell made an appearance in the afternoon where he claimed he “prayed” for then-Democratic Senate candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to win their elections in Jan. 2021 because if a Republican had won one of those seats, “most people in the country” would not believe his and Trump’s absurd claims that widespread “election crime” was taking place in the U.S.
The FBI this week seized Lindell’s phone while the pillow magnate was in line at a Hardee’s drive-thru. Trump, meanwhile, continues to fight the Justice Department’s search of his Mar-a-Lago compound and Georgia’s election interference prosecution alongside a host of other legal woes.
“We are a nation in decline,” Trump said toward the conclusion of the rally. As he spoke, dramatic classical strings music swelled in the background (yes, seriously), giving the moment a cinematic propaganda feel.