Donald Trump spoke to a packed auditorium in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, while thousands gathered outside in the Georgia heat, waiting to get in and protesting his appearance in a city he has repeatedly denounced.
His remarks were consistent with the tone and demeanor of restraint and honesty that Atlantans are accustomed to hearing at this time.
“She happens to be someone with a very low IQ. We don’t need low IQ people,” Trump said of Vice President Kamala Harris. “They love to date low IQ people… She’s Bernie Sanders, but not as smart.”
“Atlanta is like a murder scene. The governor needs to stand up and do something,” Trump said, highlighting some of the recent murders in the city.
President Trump reeled off a string of Atlanta crime statistics that bore no resemblance to the actual crime situation over the past two years: Atlanta crime spiked in the final year of Trump’s term, peaking in 2022. Crime has since fallen to 2019 levels.
But crime, particularly crime involving immigrants, has become central to his appeal to Republican voters, and Trump has cited the case of Laken Riley, a college student who was murdered on the University of Georgia campus after police charged an illegal immigrant with her murder.
“Laken’s blood is on Kamala Harris’ hands,” Trump said. “It’s as if she saw it herself.” Trump tried to connect this to Harris’ role as “border secretary” early in the Biden administration. “She shouldn’t be asking for your vote. She should be asking Laken Riley’s family for forgiveness.”
Trump highlighted the work of three Republican appointees to the Georgia Election Board who are considering changes to election rules that critics say are setting the stage for a legal fight if Trump loses the November election.
Referring to 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 staged a coup, and he doesn’t know it.”
Trump said, without evidence, that “40 to 50 million illegal immigrants” would enter the U.S. if Harris wins, and claimed that suburbs would be overrun with “violent foreign gangs.” He also falsely claimed that Harris wants to replace all gasoline-powered cars with electric cars, ban meat consumption, and raise taxes by 70 to 80 percent, but these claims are so far removed from the truth that they can only be interpreted as exaggerations. He also repeated his claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump has repeatedly called Harris a “crazy person.”
The venue where Trump appeared in Atlanta was the same one where Harris held her first rally in Georgia on Tuesday since Biden dramatically dropped out of the race and emerged as the Democratic front-runner.
The contrast between Trump and Harris in the room was stark. On Tuesday, Harris’ multiracial audience was decked out in the pink and green of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Red MAGA hats and photos of Trump’s arrest or the now-iconic photo of him with his fist raised after the assassination attempt dominated the sea of mostly white Trump supporters.
During his speech in Atlanta, Trump lied about Harris’ event at the same location, falsely claiming people had left the events early and there were empty seats. Both events were sold out.
Notably, the upper tier of seats began to empty about an hour after Trump began speaking.
A refrain repeated by speakers at the rally was that Trump has hurt Republican voters and Republicans should return the favor with strong voter turnout in Georgia.
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“He took a bullet for you, and in that moment, we all saw what Donald Trump is like,” surrogate Marjorie Taylor Greene said during a speech to 10,000 Trump supporters at the Georgia State Convention Center. “He stood up, he pumped his fist in the air and he said, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ And that’s what we’re going to do.”
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance fired up the crowd by pointing out a growing trend of Democrats calling Republicans “wackos.”
“It’s weird that Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta and speaks with a fake Southern accent even though she grew up in Canada,” Vance said. “Watch the video. She sounds like a Southern belle.”
Vance also linked the assassination attempt to those who tried to “bankrupt” and “impeach” President Trump.
“America will never elect a San Francisco liberal who is so far outside the mainstream,” Vance said.
Despite this assertion, with the Democratic National Convention two weeks away, polls are showing Harris increasingly leading Trump. Before Biden’s withdrawal, Trump had led Biden so consistently that a major political debate here was whether the Biden campaign would concede in Georgia to focus resources on the Rust Belt races.
There are too few polls gauging Harris and Trump in Georgia to gauge the race, but both campaigns are beginning to treat it as a battleground state again.
“The road to the White House runs through Georgia,” Greene said, almost verbatim echoing what Georgia Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock told Harris supporters five days earlier.
In long-winded, rambling comments, Trump slammed Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for disloyalty: “In my opinion, they want us to lose. If we lose in Georgia, we lose everything and the country goes to hell.”
