Speaking to a crowd of several thousand supporters at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on Monday night, former President and current Republican nominee Donald Trump made his closing pitch of the 2024 campaign, saying he would be the better person to run America’s economy, protect the nation’s borders and prevent transgender women from participating in amateur women’s sports.
“We will not be occupied, we will not be overrun, we will be a free and proud nation once again,” Trump said, using the same extreme language he has used to describe immigrants since he entered politics nine years ago and conjuring images of a foreign invasion at the U.S. southern border.
Trump’s appearance Monday in Pittsburgh marked his final Western Pennsylvania appearance of the 2024 campaign and the penultimate rally of the campaign overall before voters across the country head to the polls on Tuesday.
He acknowledged the approaching end of his third campaign for president, becoming nostalgic at several moments. “There will never be rallies like this. You're going to have some leading candidate in four years, and if they’re successful, they'll have 300 or 400 people in a ballroom. This is never going to happen again.”
Trump started his speech with the kind of question that a typical candidate trying to unseat an incumbent would ask: "Are you better off four years later?"
"No!" was the enthusiastic response from the crowd, which nearly filled the entire lower bowl of the arena in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood.
But Trump’s spell of wistfulness didn’t last long, as he quickly reassumed the bombastic entertainment persona that established his widespread name recognition and catapulted him to fame as a developer, TV personality on “The Apprentice” and the U.S. presidency.
"The worst vice president in history — Kamala, you're fired," he said of his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. "Get out."
And nine years after he kicked off his first campaign for president by condemning undocumented Mexican immigrants and saying “They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he returned to those themes of immigrant violence and criminality without any sort of positive qualifiers.
Instead, he castigated immigrant groups to the very end, claiming that "they're killers, they're murderers." He said Harris "eradicated our southern border and unleashed an army of gangs" and "allowed people to come in from prisons and insane asylums,” despite evidence that suggests immigrants are on average less violent than U.S.-born citizens.
And after describing the violent murder of two girls by an immigrant in graphic detail, Trump described his plan to implement a mass deportation of millions of immigrants using an 18th-century law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
"And if they come back into our country, it's an automatic 10 years in jail with no possibility of parole." Trump said. "And I am here calling for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen." The audience roared with approval.
Trump barely mentioned building a wall with Mexico, a cornerstone promise of his 2016 campaign that went largely unrealized during his four years in office. Instead, Trump invoked his latest favorite economic weapon, tariffs, which he says he will wield widely in a second term.
"If we put even a small tariff [on Mexico], even 10 or 15%, we're talking tens of billions of dollars," he said.
Trump’s speech contained many of the phrases that have become hallmarks of his speaking style, including some of the authoritarian themes that have caused a number of former Republicans to endorse Harris, such as calling the free press the "fake news."
He called into question the reliability of the country's election process, while at the same time expressing confidence he would win. "I do believe it's too big to rig," he said. "They'll try."
Trump sowed doubt about government job statistics because of normal adjustments to jobs reports. He claimed without evidence that the government was hiring people just to keep the job numbers up and falsely claimed that immigrants were getting all the jobs. "These are government numbers, not Trump numbers," he said.
In Trump's life as a businessman he rarely, if ever, mentioned religion, and during his first election he memorably couldn't name a book in the Bible as his favorite. But his speeches and campaign iconography have more recently adopted religious overtones. And Trump embraced it in describing how he narrowly survived an assassination attempt only an hour away in Butler County.
"Many people say that God saved me in order to save America," he said.
Trump called the crowd "frisky" as it chanted "U-S-A" and "Trump-Trump-Trump" throughout his speech. And the crowd booed loudly for Trump's condemnation of transgender athletes. In 2015, Trump ran as a moderate on LGBTQ issues, bucking Republican orthodoxy, but he has long since abandoned that stance.
"I've been a politician now, I can't believe I say that is nine years…” he said. “Nobody has ever said it's really important to let men into women's sports."
Nine years later, much the same, much changed
Trump’s rally Monday also reflected the racial polarization that has also characterized his ascendancy. There were almost no Black people in the crowd, despite the event taking place on the edge of the historically Black Hill District. Trump has criticized Black athletes and sometimes has made ambivalent statements about white supremacist rallies. And while some pollsters believe Trump is making inroads with both Black and Hispanic voters, few of them appeared at his Pittsburgh rally.
His supporters were wearing various kinds of Trump-branded merchandise. In addition to some ordinary campaign merchandise, some of the Trump gear being worn often depicted crude language and middle-finger gestures, and it included gold chains and Trump-branded Bibles.
The rally, along with a near-simultaneous campaign event by Harris at The Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic site about eight miles away, underlined the importance both Trump and Harris have placed on winning Pennsylvania, with each of them returning repeatedly to the region.
The event Monday evening also underscored the unique position in which Trump finds himself with regards to his former staff. Mike Pompeo, the CIA Director and U.S. Secretary of State under Trump, told the crowd he was Trump's most loyal cabinet member, according to The Washington Post. "It was not a compliment," Pompeo said.
Trump is unique among modern presidential candidates in the number of former cabinet officials, high-level staff members and military generals, who either resigned during his term, refused to endorse him or have endorsed Harris instead. That includes his former Vice President, Mike Pence. Even Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, has yet to appear at one of his rallies. Ivanka Trump, who served in the White House during Trump’s first term, has also largely skipped Trump’s final campaign.
During the rally, Trump announced that he had just been endorsed by Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, who cited Elon Musk in his endorsement. Musk, the billionaire industrialist, has taken a leading role in running Trump’s campaign in recent weeks and has spread misinformation about the election on the website, X, which he owns.
Trump also rolled out the endorsements of the daughter of Cleveland Browns football legend Jim Brown, as well as the son of Pittsburgh Pirates legend Roberto Clemente.
And wrapping a bow on the past nine years, Trump invited to the stage Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News journalist who he famously insulted with a lewd remark after a 2015 debate that Kelly had co-moderated. Nevertheless, Kelly endorsed Trump on Monday because of his stances on immigration and transgender issues.
“He will be a protector of women, and that’s why I’m voting for him,” she said.
As Trump’s speech entered its second hour and he meandered back to a story about auto tariffs, he called himself, “The greatest weaver of all time” for what he terms his ability to weave together what can often seem like a series of unrelated points and tangents.
Trump called on his supporters to go out and vote on Tuesday.
"The only way we can blow it is if you blow it,” he said. “I've given you the ball."
