Donald Trump spent the last weekend of the 2024 election cycle appearing to run out of gas, while continuing to embrace unhinged and bigoted rhetoric at his rallies.
Trump is also having problems getting supporters to show up for his last events. The Harris-Walz campaign circulated a video of Trump speaking in Georgia in front of many empty seats. The state is key to both campaigns, after it swung from years of supporting Republicans to backing President Joe Biden by less than 1% in 2020.
The Trump fans who showed up at his campaign stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, got to see him mime having oral sex with a microphone. Many of them applauded and laughed as Trump leaned into the device, frustrated that the equipment was malfunctioning.
In a similar vein, Trump praised a supporter who said Vice President Kamala Harris “worked the corner,” a reference to prostitution.
While he has bristled at Harris and several of his ex-staffers calling him a fascist, Trump gave the argument more evidence in Philadelphia. Speaking about vacating the White House after he lost the 2020 election to Biden, Trump said, “I shouldn’t have left. I mean, honestly, because we did so, we did so well.” When he left, COVID-19 deaths were at 213,964 and the unemployment rate was 6.4% (it is currently 4.1%).
At his Michigan event, Trump spoke about his “beautiful white skin” and how he “could have had the greatest life in the world” instead of running for president again, spending his time at the beach “being smacked in the face by a wave.”
Over the weekend, Iowa pollster Ann Selzer’s newly released poll showed an unexpected lead for Harris (the state has voted for Republicans in every presidential election since 2012) and Trump was not pleased.
Trump accused Selzer of doing “damage” and “suppression” that “should be illegal.”
At the same rally, he said he wouldn’t mind if someone “shot through the fake news” while attempting to hurt him.
Discussing the support he has received from failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump told NBC News that Kennedy’s idea to remove fluoride from water “sounds OK to me.” Attacking fluoridation—which has been shown to be beneficial to public health—is a longtime obsession of conspiracy theorists. Kennedy has promoted conspiracies about vaccines and Trump has proposed to put him in charge of public health issues if he wins.
Calling into his allies at “Fox & Friends” on Fox News, Trump argued that it is wrong for women to hide who they voted for from a spouse, as seen in a recent pro-Harris ad from the group Vote Common Good.
“Can you imagine a wife not telling her husband who she’s voting for? You ever hear anything like that?” Trump said.
Trump was granted two minutes of airtime on NBC following Harris’ surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live” as part of the opening of the show and the result was a low-energy request for votes from Trump that aired during NASCAR and NFL football broadcasts.
Summing up the weekend, a senior Harris campaign official on a conference call with reporters said, “He really is closing his campaign with total darkness and anger.”
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