Donald Trump addressed a fully-packed venue in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, with thousands of people waiting in the Georgia heat outside to enter, or to protest his appearance in a city he has condemned repeatedly.
His remarks were consistent with the tenor and comportment of restraint and probity Atlantans are used to hearing at this point.
“She happens to be a really low IQ individual. We don’t need a low IQ individual,” Trump said of the vice-president Kamala Harris. “They love dealing with low IQ individuals … She’s Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”
Trump highlighted a handful of recent 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 would debate on Fox News – but Harris insists on ABC
Trump rattled off a set of crime statistics in Atlanta that bear no resemblance to the actual change in crime over the last two years. Crime spiked in Atlanta in the last year of Trump’s term and peaked in 2022. It has subsequently fallen back to 2019 levels.
But crime – and particularly crime involving immigrants – has been central to his appeal to Republican voters. Trump invoked the murder of Laken Riley, a college student murdered on the campus of the University of Georgia. Police have charged an undocumented immigrant with her murder.
“Laken’s blood is on Kamala Harris’s hands,” Trump said, “as though she was standing there watching it herself.” Trump is trying to tie this to Harris’s role as “border czar” early in the Biden administration. “Harris should not be asking for your votes. She should be begging Laken Riley’s family for forgiveness.”
Trump made a point of highlighting the work of three Republican appointees to Georgia’s board of elections, who have been entertaining changes to election rules that critics say are setting the stage for a legal contest in case of a Trump loss in November.
Of President Joe Biden and the debate that led to his withdrawal from the race, Trump said “He was choking like a dog! He was choking. And that was the end of him … they did 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 that suburbs will be overrun with “savage foreign gangs”. He also claimed, falsely, that Harris wants to replace all gas cars with electric cars, to ban meat, to increase taxes by 70 to 80% and more claims that can only be taken as hyperbole because they are so far divorced from fact. He also reiterated claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump repeatedly called Harris a “lunatic”.
Trump’s appearance in Atlanta is at the same venue Harris filled on Tuesday in her first Georgia rally since Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the race and her ascension as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The contrast between Trump and Harris in the space was stark. Harris’s multiracial crowd Tuesday was peppered with the pink and green of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters. Red Maga hats and Trump mug shots – or the now-iconic shot of his fist in the air after the assassination attempt – dominated the mostly white sea of support for Trump.
Trump opened up his appearance in Atlanta lying about the Harris event in the same place, falsely claiming that people left the event early and that there were empty seats. Both events packed the room.
Notably, the upper stands began to empty out 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 powerful turnout in Georgia.
“He took a bullet for you, and in that moment, we found out who Donald Trump is,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative, in a speech before 10,000 Trump supporters at the Georgia State Convocation Center. “He stood up, put his fist in the air and said ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ And that’s what we will do.”
JD Vance, Republican vice-presidential nominee, took note of the emerging Democratic labeling of Republicans as “weird” as he warmed up the crowd.
Weird is 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 also linked the people who tried to “bankrupt” and “impeach” Trump to the attempted assassination.
“America is never going to elect a San Francisco liberal who is so far out of the mainstream,” Vance said.
Despite this assertion, polls increasingly suggest that Harris may be ahead of Trump today, with the Democratic national convention coming in two weeks. Before Biden’s withdrawal, Trump had been consistently ahead of Biden, so much so that political discussion here had been about whether the Biden campaign would capitulate in Georgia in order to focus its resources on Rust Belt races.
Too few polls measuring Harris and Trump in Georgia have been conducted to read the race here, but both campaigns have begun treating Georgia as a battleground state once again.
“The road to the White House runs through Georgia,” Greene said, almost word for word what Rev Raphael Warnock, a Georgia senator, 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: “In my opinion, they want us to lose. If we lose Georgia, we lose the whole thing and our country goes to hell.”
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