Donald Trump spoke to a packed hall in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, as thousands waited outside in the Georgia heat to protest or get inside his appearance in a city he has repeatedly condemned.
His statements were consistent with the tone and manner of restraint and honesty that Atlantans have become accustomed to hearing at this point.
“She’s a really low-IQ individual. We don’t need a low-IQ individual,” Trump said of Vice President Kamala Harris. “They like to mess with low-IQ individuals… She’s Bernie Sanders, but she’s not that smart.”
“Atlanta is a killing field and your governor needs to get off his ass and do something about it,” Trump said, noting several recent murders in the city.
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Trump has listed a series of crime statistics that bear no resemblance to the actual change in Atlanta’s crime rate over the past two years. Crime in Atlanta rose in Trump’s final year in office, peaking in 2022 before falling back to 2019 levels.
But crime — and crime involving immigrants in particular — has been central to his appeal to Republican voters. Trump invoked the murder of Laken Riley, a college student who was killed on the University of Georgia campus. Police have charged an undocumented immigrant with the killing.
“Laken’s blood is on Kamala Harris’ hands,” Trump said, “as if she were standing there watching.” Trump tried to tie that to Harris’ role as “border czar” early in the Biden administration. “Harris shouldn’t be asking for your votes. She should be asking for clemency from Laken Riley’s family.”
Trump also highlighted the work of three Republican appointees to the Georgia elections board who are considering changes to election rules that critics say pave the way for a legal race if Trump loses in November.
“He was choking like a dog! He was choking. And that was the end of him… They had a coup and he didn’t know it,” Trump said of President Joe Biden and the controversy that led to his withdrawal from the race.
Trump said, without any evidence, that if Harris wins, “40 or 50 million illegal immigrants” will enter the United States and claimed that the suburbs would be overrun with “violent alien gangs.” He also falsely claimed that Harris had made claims such as replacing all gas cars with electric cars, banning meat, increasing taxes by 70% to 80%, and many other claims that can only be taken as exaggerations because they are so far from the truth. He also repeated claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump has repeatedly called Harris “crazy.”
Trump’s appearance in Atlanta is taking place at the same venue where Harris attended her first Georgia rally since Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the race on Tuesday and her own rise as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The contrast between Trump and Harris was striking in the space. Harris’ multiracial crowd on Tuesday was filled with the pink and green colors of her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Red Maga hats and Trump’s mugshots — or the now-iconic photo of him raising his fist in the air after the assassination attempt — dominated the mostly white sea of Trump support.
Trump opened his Atlanta appearance by lying about the Harris event at the same venue, claiming people left the event early and that there were empty seats. Both events filled the room.
It was noticeable that the stands began to empty approximately an hour after Trump’s statements.
The refrain repeated by speakers at the rally was that Trump took a bullet for Republican voters and that Republicans should respond with a strong turnout in Georgia.
“He took a bullet for you, and in that moment we learned who Donald Trump was,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said before 10,000 Trump supporters at the Georgia State Capitol. “He stood up, raised his fist in the air and said, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ And that’s what we’re going to do.”
As Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance mobilized the crowd, he noticed that Democrats began labeling Republicans as “weird.”
Vance said it was strange that “Kamala Harris came to Atlanta and grew up in Canada and still speaks with a fake Southern accent.” “Watch the clips; she sounds like a Southern belle.”
Vance also linked those trying to “defund” and “impeach” Trump to the assassination attempt.
“America will never elect a San Francisco liberal who is so far from the mainstream,” Vance said.
Despite that claim, polls increasingly suggest Harris could be ahead of Trump today, with the Democratic national convention in two weeks. Before Biden’s withdrawal, Trump had consistently led Biden, so much so that the political debate there was whether he would concede in Georgia to focus the Biden campaign’s resources on Rust Belt races.
Few polls have been conducted in Georgia measuring Harris and Trump, making it impossible to tell what the race will be like there, but both campaigns are starting to see Georgia as a closely contested state once again.
“The road to the White House is through Georgia,” Greene said, echoing almost word for word what Georgia senator the Rev. Raphael Warnock told Harris supporters five days ago.
In lengthy and scattered comments, Trump accused governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger of disloyalty: “I think they want us to lose. If we lose Georgia, we lose everything and our country goes to hell.”