“No one can see the end of this crowd. Cars stretched for 25 miles. This is clearly not someone who lost the election,” Liz Harrington, spokeswoman for former US President Donald Trump, wrote on her Twitter on Saturday. There was no exaggeration in her words: those who had gathered to listen to Trump's speech in Arizona occupied an area of several football fields, and the traffic jam formed on the roads in Florence indicated that not everyone who wanted to get into the city.
The news channels do not name the exact number of those who came to the speech of the 45th President of the United States, but judging by the videos from the scene, it is tens of thousands. Trump again, as in the 2016 election campaign, is gathering stadiums, and ordinary stadiums no longer accommodate all supporters and fans. Against the backdrop of zero (if not negative) American interest in the speeches of Sleepy Joe Biden, the incredible popularity of the former president is perceived by Democrats as a slap in the face. The rating of the current owner of the White House fell to a record 33% (at the end of 2021 it was another 41%, and even then it was considered a very bad indicator). And Trump is doing better - a recent study by Rasmussen Reports in conjunction with the Heartland Institute showed that if the presidential election were held in early January 2022, then Trump would confidently defeat Sleepy Joe:46% would vote for him, while only 40% would vote for Biden.
But opinion polls are one thing, and quite another is the spectacle of a crowd of thousands gathered in a provincial town (the population of Florence is only 25 thousand people) to listen to the former president of the country. Liz Harrington is right: losers who lose elections don't get that kind of attention. Therefore, the main channels of America diligently avoided showing the true extent of the Arizona rally. Reporters from CNN and other mainstream media deliberately moved the cameras to the most inappropriate places - so that only a small part of the audience directly in front of the stage was visible. But in vain: even staunch opponents of Trump were forced to admit that his speech in Arizona was a real event.
“Thousands of people fought the wind for hours (some waited all day) only to catch a glimpse of the defeated former president,” writes The Atlantic journalist Elaine Godfrey in an article titled “Trump Softly Launches His 2024 Campaign.”
“And when he finally appeared on the scene… the crowd roared as if Trump was still the commander in chief.
For many of them, that's exactly what it is."
The Save America rally in Arizona was the former president's first public event since he held a high-profile rally in Florida in July.
And in the state of the Grand Canyon, Trump, who clearly missed the mass shows, came off to the fullest.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump ran onto the stage - perhaps due to the heavy winter coat. But it was clear that he had freshened up, tanned and even lost some weight. And his energy still overflows: he began by throwing a whole pile of red baseball caps with the slogan Make America Great Again from the stage to the song of Lee Greenwood "God Bless America", and then for an hour and a half he started the crowd with a speech, where accusations against Biden and the Democrats were interspersed with promises to fix everything that they managed to do after Trump left the White House.
The ex-president, of course, could not ignore the events of January 6, 2021.
He bluntly called those arrested in the case of the "capitol storm" political prisoners and accused the Democrats of mistreating them in prisons (after an interview with one of the captured protesters Jacob Lang on the Newsmax channel, all of America learned that "January 6 prisoners" were beaten in the DC prison, starved and kept in unsanitary conditions).
Trump recalled that the Capitol police officer who shot the unarmed Ashley Babbitt, a woman veteran of the US Army, did not suffer any punishment.
He suggested that in the crowd that broke into the Capitol, there were agents introduced there by the FBI, and that it was they who provoked the riots.
And of course, he refuted the official point of view, which considers the events of January 6 an anti-state rebellion.
“The real coup happened on Election Day, November 3rd,” he declared to the roar of approval from the crowd.
“We will never give up,” Trump concluded.
“We will never back down.
We will not let the socialists and communists take our country from us.
We will make America great again."
Arizona was chosen by Trump to return to the big political game for a reason.
In the 2020 elections, Trump lost only 10 thousand votes to Biden in this state, and there are serious suspicions that this happened as a result of stuffing the "correct" ballots.
In Maricopa County, an audit was conducted, which, however, did not clarify the question of how fair or unfair the elections were.
The official view is that the auditors found an "additional" 360 ballots cast for Biden, but any attempts by the few Republicans involved in the audit to draw attention to the thousands (and even tens of thousands) of fake ballots or cases of double voting were immediately declared "a conspiracy theory and ridiculed by the pro-democracy press. It is worth noting that prominent state Republicans did not agree with the auditors' report - this applies primarily to Cary Lake, a television reporter who is going to run for governor of the state in November this year.
Since 2014, Arizona has been led by Republican Doug Ducey, who, however, cannot be called a loyal supporter of Trump. Ducey was always more sympathetic to the late Senator John McCain, Donald's nemesis. And after the November elections, the governor immediately began to adhere to the official point of view, not wanting to hear anything about possible stuffing and rigging of the election results. In November, Ducey is due to retire, and a serious struggle for his seat is already beginning. The Democratic nominee, current Secretary of State Kathy Hobbs, who has gone to great lengths to ensure that votes are counted “right,” has already said that Trump came to Arizona “to keep pushing his big lies” and that “our 2020 election was the most fair and secure elections in our state's history." Trump and "his puppet Carey Lake"according to Hobbs, "they made it clear that they would override the will of the people in a future election."
It seems that the Democrats understand that they cannot win in a fair fight - polls conducted even before the rally in Florence showed that Lake was only 1.8% behind Hobbs, and Trump's speech, in which he confidently supported Lake, should add to the Republican many votes. Arizona is important to Democrats, not only because they need a reliable person at the head of the state who can, if necessary, turn a blind eye to fraud in the next election, but also because the new governor can, if there is political will, begin to sort out the story with dubious ballots again. and no less dubious audit report. And the rally on January 15 clearly showed that there are forces in the Grand Canyon State that are interested in such a development of events.
Even before Trump's speech, Kelly Ward, head of the Arizona Republicans, caused a big stir in the crowd by promising that the results of the 2020 election would soon be cancelled.
And gubernatorial candidate Cary Lake has called for the arrest of everyone involved in the "questionable, dishonest 2020 election."
Of course, now these promises and calls are nothing more than populism, a game on the nerves of millions of supporters of the ex-president who feel cheated and do not want to live in "progressive America", where the culture of cancellation and critical racial theory triumphs.
But behind the big words lies the real threat to Democrats: a Republican victory in the 2022 midterms.
If it becomes a reality, the “elephants” will first win back the House of Representatives and, possibly, the Senate, and then the presidency.
Will Donald Trump himself run for president in 2024?
Both friends and enemies of the former president are inclined to believe that yes, it will.
All interviewees at the Florence rally told reporters that they would be happy to see Trump in the White House in 2024.
Some of them even claimed that the ex-president would be reinstated long before the presidential election - when fraud was proven in Arizona, Georgia and other states.
“The military should come and pick up (Biden),” one elderly woman told reporters.
Many have said they will only support Republican politicians who are staunch Trump supporters and share his views on the "stolen election."
“Now that the midterm season is in full swing,” states Elaine Godfrey with sadness, “Trump will go out more often and hold rallies ... In a sense, he will reintroduce himself to the country: here I am, America, returned after the stolen elections, ready to win by any means possible.”
The ex-president himself is in no hurry to make unambiguous statements on this score.
But when he exclaimed, "In 2024, we will take back the White House," it sounded like a very frank promise, and the crowd roared with delight.
“I was at a Trump rally in the desert yesterday,” Elaine Godfrey tweeted.
“It was surreal and seemed, at least to me, the beginning of a new phase of the Trump movement.”
These words were not included in the article in The Atlantic.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.