by Donald Trump addressed a packed venue in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, with thousands of people waiting in the Georgia heat outside to get in, or to protest his appearance in a city he has repeatedly criticized.
His views were consistent with the meaning and comfort of restraint and integrity.
“She happens to be a low IQ individual. We don’t need a low IQ individual,” Trump said of vice president Kamala Harris. “They love to deal with low IQ individuals … She’s Bernie Sanders but she’s not that smart.”
Trump recently highlighted a spate of murders in the city, saying “Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor should get off his ass and do something about it.”
Related: Trump says he’d debate on Fox News — but Harris insists on ABC
Trump finished with a series of crime statistics in Atlanta that bear no resemblance to the actual change in crime over the past two years. Crime in Atlanta increased in the last year of Trump’s term and peaked in 2022. It has since fallen back to 2019 levels.
But crime – and especially crime related to immigrants – was central to his appeal to Republican voters. Trump called for the murder of Laken Riley, a college student who was murdered on the University of Georgia campus. Police have charged an undocumented immigrant with her murder.
“Kamala Harris has Laken’s blood on her hands,” Trump said, “as if she was standing there watching him.” Trump is trying to tie this to Harris’ role as a “border czar” early in the Biden administration. “Harris shouldn’t be asking for your votes. She should be begging the Laken Riley family for forgiveness.”
Trump made a point to highlight the work of three Republican appointees on the Georgia election board, who have been entertaining changes to election rules that critics say are setting the stage for a legal contest in the event of a Trump loss in November.
Regarding President Joe Biden and the debate that caused him to withdraw from the race, Trump said “He was choking like a dog! He was choking. And that was the end of it… they made a coup, but he doesn’t know it.”
Trump said, without any evidence, that “40 or 50 million illegal aliens” will enter the United States if Harris wins, he said, claiming the suburbs will be overrun with “vicious alien gangs.” He also claimed, falsely, that Harris wants to replace all gas cars with electric cars, ban meat, increase taxes by 70 to 80% and demand more that can only be accepted as hyperbole because they are so far divorced from fact. He also reiterated that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump has repeatedly called Harris a “lunatic”.
Trump’s appearance in Atlanta is at the same venue that Harris filled Tuesday in his first Georgia rally since Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the race and his ascension as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The contrast between Trump and Harris in the space was striking. Tuesday’s diverse Harris crowd was filled with the pink and green of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters. Trump’s Red Mag hats and mug shots – or the now-iconic shot of his fist in the air after the assassination attempt – dominated the white sea of support for Trump.
Trump opened his appearance in Atlanta by lying about Harris’s departure at the same venue, falsely claiming that people had left the event early and that there were empty seats. The room was packed at both events.
Notably, the upper stands began to empty about an hour into Trump’s comments.
The refrain, repeated by speaker after speaker at the rally, was that Trump took a bullet for Republican voters, and they should return the favor with a powerful turnout in Georgia.
“He took a bullet for you, and in that moment, we found out who Donald Trump is,” said representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, in a speech before 10,000 Trump supporters at the Georgia State Convention Center. “He stood up, put his fist in the air and said ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ And that’s what we will do.”
JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, noted that Republicans were labeling the emerging Democrats as “weird” as he fired up the crowd.
It’s weird how “Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta and speaks with a fake southern accent even though she grew up in Canada,” Vance said. “Go watch the clips; she sounds like a southern belle.”
Vance linked the people who tried to “bankrupt” and “impeach” Trump to the assassination attempt.
“America is never going to elect a liberal from San Francisco who is so far out of the mainstream,” Vance said.
Despite this declaration, polls suggest that Harris could be ahead of Trump today, with the Democratic national convention coming up in two weeks. Before Biden withdrew, Trump was consistently ahead of Biden, so much so that there was a political debate here about whether the Biden campaign would join Georgia to focus its resources on Rust Belt races.
There weren’t too many polls measuring Harris and Trump in Georgia to read the race here, but both campaigns have begun treating Georgia as a battleground state again.
“The road to the White House runs through Georgia,” Greene said, almost verbatim about what the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia senator, had told Harris supporters five days earlier.
In long rambling comments, Trump lambasted Brian Kemp, the governor, and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, for disloyalty: “I think they want us to lose. If we lose Georgia, we lose everything and our country goes to hell.”
