Donald Trump has arrived back in Atlanta with a week and a day to go, looking for votes in a state quickly running out of voters to woo.
“I heard the votes are coming in very well,” the former president said. When he asked the crowd who voted, about half of them raised their hands and cheered. “We have to get this over with.”
Just before Trump took the stage Monday afternoon across the street from the CNN debate stage that knocked Joe Biden out of the race, the number of early votes in Georgia passed the three million mark. More than 40% of Georgia voters have already cast their ballots. About 5 million people voted in Georgia’s 2020 presidential race.
Trump refrained from his usual practice of trashing Atlanta, despite his disparagement of Fulton County District Attorney Fanny Willis and the election interference charges he still faces, a reference to “Fanny and her boyfriend” trying to lock up their “political opponent.”
He described Harris’ campaign as one of “demonization and hate,” then pointed to her “crazy, extreme left-wing policies.”
“They say: ‘It’s Hitler.’ They say: “He’s a Nazi.” “I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” he said. “How can Kamala Harris lead America when she hates Americans? … They are very bad people and a threat to democracy.”
Trump took issue with recent criticism from Michelle Obama. “It was bad,” Trump said.
But Trump generally stuck to familiar themes about how illegal immigrants are “savages” and “monsters” who are “destroying this country,” the dangers of accepting transgender surgery and the size of his rallies. He said he would support a tax credit for family caregivers — a new economic proposal eight days before the election.
Racist comments made yesterday by a conservative comedian at Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden in New York cast a shadow over the message the campaign intends to deliver. Critics on the left had widely likened the event to a Nazi Party rally held there in the run-up to World War II, based on reports from his former officials that Trump admired Hitler’s generals and wished his generals were like them. .
In introductory remarks before Trump’s appearance, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene complained about the way the Sunday evening rally was portrayed in the media.
“This letter is the reason I received death threats,” Green said. “We’re tired of being called Nazis and fascists. They’re absolutely lies, and we’re not going to take it anymore,” he said, suggesting conservatives should file a class-action lawsuit to silence such criticism.
The crowd at McCamish Pavilion on the Georgia Tech campus was much smaller than most rallies held near Atlanta over the past month. Perhaps a quarter of the attendees were Georgia Tech students or recent graduates.
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Although Georgia Tech students have a long-standing tradition of stealing the letter T from every sign they can see on campus, the Trump signs were apparently unaffected.
However, Lt. Gov. Bert Jones had the audacity to joke about how Kirby Scott, the University of Georgia football coach, was a gift from God while speaking to an arena full of Georgia Tech students on their campus.
Georgia Tech tends to be a less politically active campus than the state’s flagship university, Georgia State University, which is located a few miles east of campus, or Emory University, which held vociferous protests about the war in Gaza earlier this General.
However, a group of pro-Palestinian students held a massive display of flags marking the deaths of Gazans in the middle of Georgia Tech’s campus before Trump’s visit. Renee Al-Nobani, a civil engineering student, said that the demonstration had less to do with Trump’s presence than with a public call for the university to disclose and withdraw investments in Israel.
“We should talk about the war in Gaza every day,” she said. “Any leader, most of all a presidential candidate, has a responsibility to devote a major effort to ending genocide with every ounce of power he has.”
