Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump capped off a visit to Western Pennsylvania on Monday with a scattershot hour-and-a-half-long speech — an address that wandered with somewhat less apparent purpose than his campaign had navigated the countryside earlier in the day.
“Our entire nation is depending on the people of this great Commonwealth” to deliver a victory on Election Day, Trump told an audience of supporters gathered in the 5,000-seat Ed Fry Arena at the Kovalchick Convention and Athletic Complex in Indiana, Pa. “And I know you’re not going to let us down.”
Trump began to speak about 50 minutes after his scheduled 7 p.m. start time, but he made up for lost time by attacking polls and the press, both of which have cast doubt on his prospects for victory in recent days.
"Polls are fake, too, just like these people — the fake news," he said.
The speech was replete with attacks on Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris, whose intelligence and competence Trump derided repeatedly.
"She can't answer a question," he said of Harris, who met him in a debate earlier this month in which she was widely declared the winner.
While repeatedly mispronouncing Harris' first name, Trump said that to win the presidential election, "All I have to do is expose her for what she is. She’s a communist, okay? And this country is not ready for a communist and hopefully never will be.”
Trump noted at one point that Harris is reportedly going to speak in Pittsburgh later this week “about her plan to, quote, ‘build wealth,” he scoffed. “But she’s been there four years. She hasn’t done anything but destroy our country."
Trump’s harshest attacks were based on immigration, a topic that has eclipsed many others as a focus for his recent speeches. He pledged that he “would make you safe at the border, on the sidewalks of your now-violent cities. In your suburbs where you are under migrant criminal siege.”
Still, Trump touched only glancingly on local news regarding concerns that are, at least in theory, at the center of his campaign. He briefly discussed fracking — a practice that Harris has said in the past that she would halt — and said anyone who believed she had dropped those objections should “have your head examined.”
But within moments, he dropped that topic to discuss his dissatisfaction with late-night talk show hosts.
“Where is Johnny Carson?” he mused at one point while criticizing NBC host Jimmy Fallon and offering praise for Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, even though he had gripes with that network.
“They put me on, and then they follow me with a horrible commercial,” he lamented. “I don’t like anybody that doesn’t like me, I’ll be honest,” he said, adding that it “sounds childish.”
The speech took place just a 15-minute drive from the Homer City power plant, which was shuttered last year. But while that closure might have seemed a natural way to reinforce his criticisms of Democratic energy policies, Trump did not mention the facility.
He did, however, briefly revisit his pledge to oppose the sale of U.S. Steel to Japan-based Nippon Steel — a position cheered by many in the audience. And he returned to remarks he’s made previously about the Mon Valley borough of Charleroi, which has seen an influx of immigration from Haiti in recent years.
“Would you say your town has changed just a little bit?” he asked supporters who shouted out that they were from Charleroi. “Is it a totally different place?”
“It’s disgusting!” one called back.
For the most part, though, Trump dwelled on familiar concerns, such as the price of bacon and his standing in the polls. As he has in the past, Trump revisited his resentment of the fact that he was not declared the winner in Pennsylvania earlier on Election Night in 2016.
And he hinted, without saying explicitly, that he didn’t think his loss in 2020 was legitimate despite a total lack of systemic fraud and a slew of court decisions that rejected his efforts to overturn the result.
“If I thought I lost that election, I wouldn’t be doing this,” he said. “When that happens, you cannot let people get away with it.”
At one point, Trump's grievances from the last election left Trump urging supporters to vote early with mail-in ballots — while simultaneously suggesting that doing so could create the possibility for fraud.
"We got to get out and vote, and you can start right away," he said. "Now we have this stupid stuff where you can vote 45 days early. I wonder what the hell happens during that 45. ... 'We've got about a million votes in there, let's move them.' ... What happened the last time was disgraceful, including right here."
He also projected a graph displaying immigration trends in recent years — the same graph at which he was looking during an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler County earlier this summer.
He joked that he took the graph to bed with him, and that “immigration saved my life.” He said the graph was “a thing I’ve loved perhaps as much as any person I’ve ever met,” a statement the crowd applauded gamely.
Trump did make an effort to connect with women voters, a demographic that polls suggest he is lagging badly with. "I want to be your protector," he said, promising that women "will finally be healthy, hopeful safe and secure. Their lives will be happy, beautiful and great again." He said they wouldn't be so focused on abortion, now that a Supreme Court majority he helped appoint had voided the constitution's guarantee of the procedure, leaving states to decide the issue.
Mentions of policy — such as a pledge to cap credit card interest rates at 10% — were almost throwaway lines, with Trump offering little sense of how he planned to achieve those objectives.
Trump lamented the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine — “Ukraine is destroyed … Cities have been knocked down, the whole place" — and at one point suggested "it's our fault because ... we had the power that it would never have happened." But while he suggested that during his term other nations "would call me up to ask whether or not they could go to war with some other country," he offered little sense of how he'd end the current fighting.
Instead, Trump said that if he won the election, “The first thing I’m going to do is call up [Ukrainian leader Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and call up [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin and say, ‘You gotta make a deal.'”
“Isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t have to use the teleprompter?” he said at one point.
The audience applauded that too, though it’s not clear the sentiment was universal. While the arena was filled to capacity and most of the crowd was enthusiastic until the end, supporters began trickling out about an hour into Trump’s remarks, leaving patches of empty seating by the time the speech was over.
Farmers' worries
Trump’s speech followed a stop at a farm near Smithton, Westmoreland County, to commiserate with farmers about the threat they say China poses to U.S. agriculture. Several of them told Trump that family farms are struggling because of rising prices — and that in some cases, they are being held afloat by royalties from natural gas.
During a roundtable discussion, Trump criticized the John Deere company, which manufactures agricultural, forestry and other equipment, for recently announcing plans to move some of its jobs from the United States to Mexico.
"I’m just notifying John Deere right now: If you do that, we’ll put a 200% tariff on anything you want to sell into the United States," he said.
Mona Pappafava-Ray, the CEO of General Carbide Corporation, said her company recently took a foray into making farming equipment. She said farmers told her that the quality was good, but parts in China were so much cheaper.
“That’s why you need tariffs,” Trump interrupted.
Trump has pledged to raise tariffs across the board by 10%-20% — a centerpiece of his campaign. He recently said he would put a 200% tariff on cars, an approach he’s now threatened to take with John Deere.
Matt Carr, a dairy farmer in Westmoreland County, said the number of U.S. dairy farms had shrunk by 80% to just over 20,000 today. Carr said total production is up as dairy farms get bigger, “But we are losing the small family farm.”
Kevin Sweeney, a cattle farmer in Washington County, said farms could soon be replaced by solar energy installations whose owners can pay top dollar to generate electricity instead.
“The current offer is $3,000 per month per acre per year for the next 30 years,” he said. “That’s a lot of money.”
All that is preventing his kids from having to sell the farm to solar companies, he said, are the royalties he’s receiving for the fracking rights on his land.
Towards the end of that gathering, Trump spoke for more than 10 minutes on subjects ranging from electric vehicles and crime in San Francisco to a discussion of garbage from China.
“We're taking their garbage out of the ocean because it floats right to our West Coast and other countries, too,” he said. “Sounds bleak, but … we'll get it straightened out fast.”
Afterward, Trump made a brief visit to Sprankle's Neighborhood Market, a grocery store in Kittanning, Armstrong County, in a stop intended to play up inflation concerns.
That quick stop drew hundreds of onlookers as well as a retort from Armstrong County Democratic Committee Chair Chuck Pascal: "While it is notable that Donald Trump chose Armstrong County to make his first-ever visit to a supermarket in his lifetime, his proposals would send the grocery bills of everyday Americans through the roof," Pascal said.
Health care messages
Meanwhile, a familiar scene played out around the Kovalchick complex in Indiana in anticipation of Trump's evening appearance. A line of waiting supporters stretched back blocks from the entrance, as vendors sold Trump memorabilia — including Trump-themed “Terrible Towels.” A festive atmosphere, complete with a DJ playing the “Cha Cha Slide” near the entrance to the complex, prevailed.
Not everyone drawn to Indiana on Monday was a fan of the former president. Just across the street from the complex was parked a van, which read: “Patients Need Care Not Concepts.” (Near that was a similar truck-mounted display with a rotating array of pro-Trump slogans like “Remember … they’re not after me they’re after you.”)
The health care messaging drew on Trump’s famous Sept. 10 debate utterance that he had “concepts of a plan” for replacing former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The message was placed by the Committee to Protect Health Care, which supports the health care reforms.
Max Cooper, a Pennsylvania emergency physician and co-state lead of the group, acknowledged Monday morning that “a mobile billboard circling a rally might seem a little bit gimmicky, but it draws eyes and it brings attention to some of the nefarious things that these politicians are doing.”
Trump sought repeatedly to repeal the ACA during his time in the White House. But he has yet to propose a mechanism that would, for example, protect people with preexisting conditions.
“There will be millions of lives lost if the ACA gets repealed,” warned anesthesiologist Zeke Tayler.
Inside the arena, passions were in evidence well before Trump arrived.
Former Congressman and Trump ally Lee Zeldin, in a speech that otherwise hewed to campaign themes, took an unprompted shot at Gov. Josh Shapiro: “We all remember how pathetic it was to watch Josh Shapiro trying to un-Jewish himself to become Kamala Harris’ VP. Pathetic.”
Shapiro spokesman Manuel Bonder fired back at Zeldin, who is Jewish and previously represented a district in New York: “This disgusting rhetoric is expectable from the kind of weak, pathetic man who chooses to follow Donald Trump around the country to give forgettable pre-program[med] speeches. … The only reason he has time to be here is because his state rejected him from the governor’s office.”
And when opening speaker John Sabo, a vice president at Deep Well Services, said “The Harris team is lying [and] we are not buying it!” a member of the crowd could be heard shouting in response: “Off with her head!”
Sean Parnell, a former Congressional candidate and conservative commentator, told the crowd that at stake in this election is “a fight I believe between good and evil. … Silence in the face of evil is evil itself.”
Parnell recited a litany of scandals involving Trump, which he derided as being ginned up by Democrats and the media, while complaining about a Sunday visit by Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to a Scranton ammunition factory. Parnell said Zelenskyy was “signing bombs with Gov. [Josh] Shapiro” and that he’d been attacking Trump’s vice presidential running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who has been an outspoken critic of sending military aid to Ukraine.
“If that isn’t foreign election interference,” Parnell said, “I don’t know what is.”
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Arts & Culture Reporter
