Former United States President Donald Trump has delivered a final pitch to the American people, making four stops in three different states to denounce his opponent, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “disaster”.
“You know she’s been exposed,” Trump said at his final campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a rally that lasted so long it slipped into the early hours of Election Day.
“She’s a radical lunatic who destroyed San Francisco,” he said of the city where Harris spent the formative years of her career. “But we don’t have to settle for weakness and incompetence and decline.”
Ever since he announced in November 2022 that he would make a second re-election bid, his campaign has focused on immigration, the economy and a desire for retribution against his perceived political adversaries.
Trump has long maintained that his 2020 election defeat was the result of a “stolen” election, a false claim.
And in his final rally of the election, he applied similar language to his former Democratic adversary, President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the presidential race in July due to concerns over his age.
“They stole the election from a president,” Trump said of the circumstances of Biden’s withdrawal. “They use the word ‘coup’. I think it’s worse than a coup in a sense because in a coup there’s a little back and forth.”
Trump stumps heavily on economy
Polls show Democrats like Biden, 81, and Harris, 60, as being vulnerable on issues such as the economy and immigration.
For example, a survey in late October from The New York Times and Siena College found that more voters trusted Trump than Harris to address the economy, at a rate of 52 percent to 45.
Trump has often invoked the economy in his appeal to voters. It was no different on Monday night, when he opened his rally in Grand Rapids with a familiar question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
He proceeded to muse at length about “groceries” being an old term — before promising to bring food prices down.
“They say my groceries are so much more [expensive],” Trump said of voters. “The term is just like an old term. And it’s a beautiful [term], but they say about my groceries were so expensive. They’ll be cheaper. Your paycheques will be higher. Your streets will be safer and clear.”
Campaign fatigue
During the rally, the 78-year-old Trump also acknowledged the toll the nonstop campaign schedule has taken on him.
“This is the last one we will have to do,” he said of the Grand Rapids rally. “Doing four of these in one day is a little difficult, but not really. Because the love at every one of them has been incredible.”
The Grand Rapids appearance came at the end of a busy day of campaigning. Earlier on Monday, Trump gave speeches in Raleigh, North Carolina; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Pittsburgh, also in Pennsylvania.
But making his final appeal in Grand Rapids has become a Trump team tradition. Grand Rapids was the site of his final event in the 2016 and 2020 election cycles.
The question of Trump’s fatigue and fitness on the campaign trail has been an issue the Harris campaign has sought to weaponise.
Harris has positioned herself as a “new generation” of leader, compared with the older Trump, and her campaign recently released footage of Trump on social media appearing to nod off at a campaign event.
“Being president of the United States is probably one of the hardest jobs in the world,” Harris told reporters earlier this month. “And we really do need to ask: If he’s exhausted on the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?”
Both candidates have sought to paint the other as incapable of weathering the stresses of the White House.
Navigating controversy
In the waning days of his campaign, Trump has also had to navigate controversy over his rhetoric and that of his allies.
For instance, he faced outcry after suggesting that longtime critic, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, ought to know what it was like to have guns trained on her since her family is known for its hawkish approach to foreign policy.
On Sunday, he also said he would not “mind so much” if someone shot the media to get at him. And at a rally at Madison Square Garden a week earlier, his campaign ignited a firestorm when one of the speakers described the US island territory of Puerto Rico as “garbage”.
Trump has since sought to redirect any criticism to President Biden, who appeared to call the Republican’s supporters “garbage” in response to the Puerto Rico comment.
“I came in a sanitation uniform last week, and that worked out pretty good,” Trump told the crowd in Grand Rapids. “Because Joe Biden in one of his crazy moments said that we were all garbage.”
The crowd booed Biden in response.
Trump also returned to a talking point that earned him backlash during the June presidential debate: that migrants were stealing “Black jobs”, a phrase many critics viewed as racist.
The former president nevertheless doubled down on the assertion in his Grand Rapids rally, reverting to hyped-up rhetoric about the threat of migration.
“One hundred percent of the jobs that were created went to migrants, not to people. And I’ll tell you what. Your Black population is being devastated by these people. They’re taking all the Black population jobs away,” he said.
“You’re going to see some bad things happen. They’re taking their jobs. The Hispanic population is going to be next.”
‘We’ve been waiting four years for this’
Polls show Trump continues to be neck and neck with Harris in the final hours before Americans cast their ballots.
But in his final campaign appearances of the 2024 election cycle, Trump sought to create a false narrative that his popularity far exceeded Harris’s — and that there was no way he could lose.
“When we win the election, look, the ball’s in our hands. All we have to do is get out the vote tomorrow. You get out the vote. They can’t do anything about it. We win,” he said.
He also described his presidential bid — and his near-death experience in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July — as providential experiences.
“Just a few months ago, in a beautiful field in Pennsylvania, an assassin tried to stop our great movement. The greatest movement in history,” Trump told the Grand Rapids audience. “That was not a pleasant day. But many people say that God saved me in order to save America.”
Earlier, in Pittsburgh, Trump appeared before a large crowd and offered a closing message to voters whose support might still be undecided in the key swing state.
“We’ve been waiting four years for this,” said Trump. “We’re going to win the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and it’s going to be over.”
While on stage, he announced he had received the endorsement of Joe Rogan, the hugely influential podcaster who interviewed Trump and his running mate JD Vance.
