MIAMI — Former President Donald Trump ended his nearly two-hour-long speech at a preelection rally Sunday with a monologue set to dramatic, sentimental music playing in the background as rain poured down on the crowd in Miami.
“I’m telling you, this is the greatest rally we’ve ever had,” Trump said to his roaring fans at the Miami-Dade County Fairgrounds.
In his winding diatribe, Trump repeated his false claims of election fraud in 2020, blamed President Joe Biden’s “wide-open” border for allowing drugs and “millions of illegal aliens” into the country, claimed his Fourth Amendment rights were violated when the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents and made a rallying cry against “left-wing censorship.”
“We are just two days away from the most important midterm election in American history, and we need a landslide so big that the radical left cannot rig it or steal it,” Trump said.
When he first walked out, he waved to his fans to “God Bless the U.S.A.,” then launched into his speech by praising his home state. Trump told people to vote for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., as well as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom he called “America-first Republicans.”
He said: “Just two days from now, the people of Florida are going to reelect the wonderful, the great friend of mine Marco Rubio to the United States Senate. And you’re going to reelect Ron DeSantis as your governor.”
Later during the rally, Trump again hinted at another run for office. ‘We’re going to take back America,” he said. “We’re going to take back that big, beautiful, magnificent White House.”
Trump claimed that he won “millions and millions” more votes in his failed 2020 run than he did in 2016. “And now in order to make our country successful safe and glorious, I will probably have to do it again but stay tuned,” Trump said.
Within minutes of taking the stage, the crowd was chanting “Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up!” at Trump’s mention of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Trump blasted Biden for inflation, and Democrats who are “indoctrinating our children.”
When Trump resorted to his claims of a rigged 2020 election, the crowd cheered, “Trump Won!”
“By a lot. By a lot,” Trump said back to the crowd. “And we have to be very careful. We have to be very careful because they view the vote counter as far more important than the candidates.”
“This Tuesday, you have to crush the communists at the ballot box,” Trump said before turning his direction to the Hispanic community in the audience.
“Many Hispanic Americans have their roots in nations that have been destroyed by these vile ideologies,” Trump said as the crowd started cheering “We Love You!” in response.
Trump said his Hispanic supporters approved of his border patrol policies in his past campaigns.
About 30 minutes in, Trump made a reference to the United States House Select Committee on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, calling it the “unselect committee,” and bashed fellow Republican and vice chair of the committee U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney.
Trump took a break in his speech to play a video compilation of Biden stuttering.
“We put that up and some people laugh and they smile and they snicker, but honestly it’s not a funny thing. It’s a very dangerous situation for our country,” Trump said once the crowd stopped chanting.
In one of the warm-up speeches at the rally, the former president’s eldest son said Biden has “mush for brains.” Donald Trump Jr. used the same terminology, “mush for brains,” to describe John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, who suffered a stroke in May.
He also referred to Fetterman as “the brain-dead potential senator,” and said Democrats don’t think it’s necessary to “have a working brain.”
“You guys ready to take back your country? Have you guys had enough of the crap? Did any of the garbage that they’ve been selling you in the media and the Democrat Party actually work?” Trump Jr. said. “If you were trying to destroy America from within, what would you do differently than today’s Democrat Party? Absolutely nothing.”
The former president has been grabbing the political spotlight with rallies. At a Saturday night rally in Pennsylvania, Trump pointed to poll numbers showing him with a big lead over DeSantis and other potential Republican candidates — then applied a nickname “Ron De-Sanctimonious” — to DeSantis. Trump famously applied negative nicknames to rivals in the 2016 primaries, including “Liddle Marco” Rubio and “Lyin’ Ted” for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Rubio, who is vying for Senate against U.S. Rep. Val Demings, said, “If these people stay in power, they will destroy the greatest country in the history of the world, and we will not allow it.
“We will not allow it. And I know of no community in America that understands that better than this one, for this is a community of men and women, many of whom lost their country to Marxism, to socialism, to leftism, to the failure and the evil that it always is. And there’s no way in the world that they’re going to stand by and lose this country,” Rubio said Sunday at the rally.
“These people don’t just need to lose. They need to lose by a lot. They need to get the message. We will never be a socialist country. We will never be led by crazy people. You will not take us down the road of Marxism. You will not destroy America,” Rubio said.
At Sunday’s rally, warm-up speakers praised Trump and urged voters to reelect DeSantis, who is on Tuesday’s ballot but did not participate in the Miami rally. The governor held his own rallies, in Hillsborough, Sarasota and Lee counties on Sunday.
At DeSantis’ afternoon rally in Hillsborough County, he touted his new Office of Election Crimes and Security, created in July, using an example of a Broward County resident and Jamaican citizen who was arrested last month for allegedly voting illegally.
“And think about how that can cancel out your vote if somebody votes illegally. ... But I think what we’ve made clear to people is, you do things like violating laws, ballot harvesting, these things, you do that at your peril because we’re going to make sure our laws are enforced and the integrity measures are maintained,” DeSantis said.
He said Florida became “the nation’s citadel of freedom” under his leadership with people moving from states where governments were “bludgeoning people with restrictions” to the Sunshine State during COVID lockdowns and lambasted “woke ideology” several times in his hourlong speech, making statements similar to Trump’s about fentanyl and undocumented immigrants.
The crowd in Hillsborough County erupted when DeSantis mentioned the group of 48 Venezuelan immigrants who he flew to Martha’s Vineyard from Texas. He used the example of a Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office deputy who was killed in a hit-and-run crash by a construction worker who officials said entered the country illegally, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
“I didn’t hear a lot of outrage from the elites about that. They only get upset when we have 50 of them show up to Martha’s Vineyard. Then they get really upset,” DeSantis said as the crowd cheered.
State Sen. Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, asked the audience at the Miami rally if it missed Trump as president and led chants of “Run Trump Run. Run Trump Run.”
“He’s transformed our country. He’s not done yet,” Gruters said.
Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson, the Republican nominee for state agriculture commissioner, called Trump “America’s president.”
“I stand with President Trump for the return of Marco Rubio to Washington. We need to stop the Pelosi-Biden-Harris radical agenda until we can return a real conservative fighter to the White House in 2024.”
Simpson didn’t say who that “conservative fighter” should be.
When U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a southwest Florida Republican, invoked the name Pelosi, the audience responded with a chorus of boos then began chanting, “Lock Her Up, Lock Her Up.”
People began lining up to get into the Trump event well before noon, even though Trump wasn’t scheduled to speak until at least 5 p.m.
Many wore signature red baseball caps with Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. Some occasionally chanted “Lets Go Brandon,” a phrase Republicans use to express a negative, and obscene, view of President Joe Biden.
U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Panhandle Republican, was met with chants of “USA! USA!” when he walked onto the stage.
Speaker after speaker at the Trump rally predicted a red wave in Florida and nationally would defeat many Democrats.
Gaetz and several others said that Miami-Dade County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans in registered voters, would go Republican in the midterms.
As of Sunday afternoon, more Republicans in the county have voted than Democrats, Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections data shows.
“We are going to turn what once was reliably blue Miami-Dade County blood, MAGA red,” Gaetz said.
As of Sunday morning, almost 4.6 million Florida voters had already cast their midterm election ballots.
The Republican advantage over Democrats has continued to grow, with 337,185 more of the party’s registered voters casting ballots through Saturday. Four days earlier, the Republican advantage was 176,895 ballots cast.
DeSantis, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist, Rubio and Demings likely have the vast majority of votes from their respective parties’ registered voters. The biggest unknown are the leanings of the 897,251 ballots cast by no party affiliation/independent voters and people registered in minor parties.
Rubio told the crowd that the red shift would go far beyond Florida, citing the lunar eclipse and a blood moon, in which it appears red on Election Day. “The moon is going to be red on Tuesday. Even the moon is going red on Tuesday,” Rubio said.
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