Tuesday’s ballot is also “a springboard” for the billionaire’s probable candidacy in 2024, welcomes Dixy Chappell, employed in a crèche. “He brings energy to this campaign,” she continues, leaving the meeting, her daughter, her sister and her parents by her side.
And “we need people who will be there in three days to continue around 2024”, estimates this 49-year-old woman with fine curly hair, who came from Virginia, more than four hours away, to listen to the former president.
With a simple black vest, she was one of the few in this huge crowd without a red cap or a flocked t-shirt who came to cheer on Donald Trump, the architect of the Republican campaign for the mid-term elections and, his supporters hope, the next candidate. to the White House.
At the mention of this candidacy – “in a very, very short time, you will be very happy” – the crowd rises, impatient, inflamed. Tells him to want to postpone the announcement of his declaration to “maintain the attention” on the Republican candidacies.
“If you want to end the destruction of our country and save the American dream then this Tuesday you must vote Republican for a giant red wave,” he said on the tarmac of an airport in Latrobe, near of Pittsburgh, in the hinterland of the industrial heartland of white America.
“We are three days away from the most important elections in the history of the United States”, he hammered. “We are going to take over the House, we are going to take over the Senate,” the billionaire said again at the end of a river speech of more than two hours, so long that many left him before the end.
– “Very happy” –
The former Republican president threw himself headlong into the last days of this campaign, multiplying this week the speeches in key states like Pennsylvania, which could tip Congress to the Republican side and deprive Joe Biden of majority to rule.
With his speech centered on immigration and crime, Mr Trump placed himself in stark contrast to Joe Biden and Barack Obama, who were speaking earlier in Philadelphia, eastern Pennsylvania.
They were supporting Democrat John Fetterman in the Senate race, one of the most watched in the country, when Donald Trump came to support his opponent Mehmet Oz.
Eyes fixed on the podium where the former president stands, thousands of supporters react to each of his spades, chanting “USA” and other slogans from time to time.
– “The only one who deserves the presidency” –
He also multiplied references to the 2020 election, which he considers, despite countless evidence to the contrary, stolen, and ended his speech on a piece of music associated with the QAnon conspiratorial movement.
Norm Volpe, who came with his group of bikers for Trump, is one of his many supporters who believe in these repeatedly denied electoral conspiracy theories. But for him the main thing is elsewhere: “crazy prices”.
“Between what it was three years ago and today, it’s doubled! Food, gas, everything!” he said in his shirt in the colors of the American flag.
And, says the 57-year-old metalworker, the Democrats need to be punished for it, “everything has gone up since they took office.”
A little further on this tarmac in the plains of rural Pennsylvania, Leslie Boswell, red “Trump 2020” t-shirt on her shoulders, who says she came “to have fun and vote Trump”, as if she could not wait 2024 to support him in the voting booth.
“He brings God back to our country, he had lowered the prices, he had done everything he announced,” she congratulates herself in front of sausage sandwich stands, her sister and her nieces by her side. He is, insists this young stay-at-home mother, “the only one who deserves the presidency”.
