Addressing a crowd of several thousand supporters at Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena on Monday night, former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump delivered his final 2024 campaign speech, saying he would be the best person to lead America’s economy and protect the nation. limits and prevents transgender women from participating in amateur women’s sports.

“We will not be occupied, we will not be overrun, we will be a free and proud nation again,” Trump said, using the same extreme language he has used to describe immigrants since entering politics nine years ago and conjuring up images of a foreign invasion of the US’s southern border.

Trump’s appearance in Pittsburgh on Monday marked his final appearance in western Pennsylvania of the 2024 campaign and the penultimate rally of the campaign overall before voters across the country head to the polls on Tuesday.

He acknowledged the end of his third campaign for president, waxing nostalgic at times. “There will never be rallies like this. You’ll have a front-runner in four years, and if they’re successful, they’ll have 300 or 400 people in a ballroom. This will never happen again.”

Trump began his speech with the kind of question a typical candidate trying to unseat an incumbent asks: “Is it better four years later?”

“Not!” was the enthusiastic response from the crowd, which nearly filled the entire lower bowl of the arena in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood.

But Trump’s melancholic spell didn’t last long as he quickly reassumed the bombastic entertainer persona that established his widespread name recognition and catapulted him to fame as a developer, TV personality on “The Apprentice” and the US presidency.

“The worst vice president in history — Kamala, you’re fired,” he said of his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “Get out.”

And nine years after he began his first campaign for president, condemning undocumented Mexican immigrants and saying “They bring murder. They are rapists. And some, I suppose, are good people,” he returned to those themes of immigrant violence and crime without any positive qualifiers.

Instead, he criticized immigrant groups to the hilt, claiming that “they are murderers, they are criminals.” He said Harris “eradicated our southern border and unleashed an army of gangs” and “allowed people in from prisons and insane asylums,” despite evidence suggesting that immigrants are on average less violent than US-born citizens.

And after detailing the violent killing of two girls by an immigrant, Trump described his plan to implement a mass deportation of millions of immigrants using an 18th-century law, Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

“And if they come back to our country, it’s automatically 10 years in prison with no possibility of parole.” Trump said. “And I call for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen.” The audience roared in approval.

Trump has barely mentioned building a wall with Mexico, a cornerstone promise of his 2016 campaign that has gone largely unfulfilled during his four years in office. Instead, Trump has invoked his latest favorite economic weapon, tariffs, which he says he will use extensively in a second term.

“If we put even a small tariff (on Mexico), even 10 or 15 percent, we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars,” he said.

Trump’s speech contained many of the phrases that have become hallmarks of his speaking style, including some of the authoritarian themes that have led a number of former Republicans to endorse Harris, such as calling the free press the ” fake news”.

He questioned the reliability of the country’s electoral process while at the same time expressing confidence that he would win. “I think it’s too big to handle,” he said. – They will try.

Trump cast doubt on government jobs statistics because of normal adjustments to jobs reports. He claimed without evidence that the government hires people just to keep the number of jobs high and falsely claimed that immigrants get all the jobs. “These are government numbers, not Trump numbers,” he said.

In Trump’s life as a businessman, he rarely, if ever, mentioned religion, and during his first election he was unable to name a favorite book of the Bible. But his speeches and campaign iconography have more recently taken on religious overtones. And Trump embraced her by describing how she survived an assassination attempt just an hour away in Butler County.

“A lot of people say God saved me to save America,” he said.

Trump called the crowd “confident” as he chanted “USA” and “Trump-Trump-Trump” throughout his speech. And the crowd booed loudly for Trump’s condemnation of transgender athletes. In 2015, Trump ran as a moderate on LGBTQ issues, bucking Republican orthodoxy, but has long abandoned that position.

“I’ve been a politician now, I can’t believe I’m saying it’s nine years…” he said. “No one ever said it was really important to let men participate in women’s sports.”

Nine years later, much the same, much changed

Trump’s rally on Monday also reflected the racial polarization that has also characterized his rise. There were hardly any people of color in the crowd, despite the fact that it was held on the edge of the historic Black Hill neighborhood. Trump has criticized black athletes and sometimes made ambivalent statements about white supremacist rallies. And while some pollsters believe Trump is making inroads with both black and Hispanic voters, few of them showed up at his rally in Pittsburgh.

His supporters wore various types of Trump-branded merchandise. In addition to some regular campaign merchandise, some of the Trump gear worn often depicted foul language and middle finger gestures and included Trump-branded gold chains and Bibles.

The rally, along with a near-simultaneous campaign event held by Harris at The Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Site about eight miles away, underscored the importance Trump and Harris placed on winning Pennsylvania, each of whom has repeatedly returned in the region.

Monday night’s event also underscored the unique position Trump is in vis-a-vis his former staff. Mike Pompeo, CIA director and US secretary of state under Trump, told the crowd that he is the most loyal member of Trump’s cabinet, according to The Washington Post. “It was not a compliment,” Pompeo said.

Trump is unique among modern presidential candidates in the number of former cabinet officials, high-level staff members, and military generals who either resigned during his tenure, declined to endorse him, or endorsed Harris. That includes his former vice president, Mike Pence. Even Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, has yet to appear at one of his rallies. Ivanka Trump, who served in the White House during Trump’s first term, largely skipped Trump’s final campaign.

During the rally, Trump announced that he had just been endorsed by Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, who quoted Elon Musk in his endorsement. Musk, the billionaire industrialist, has had a leading role in running Trump’s campaign in recent weeks and has spread misinformation about the election on the website he owns, X.

Trump also released the endorsements of the daughter of Cleveland Browns football legend Jim Brown, as well as the son of Pittsburgh Pirates legend Roberto Clemente.

And in a nod to the past nine years, Trump invited Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News journalist he insulted with a lewd remark after a 2015 debate Kelly co-moderated, on stage. . However, Kelly endorsed Trump on Monday over his stances on immigration and transgender issues.

“He will be a protector of women and that’s why I’m voting for him,” she said.

As Trump’s speech entered its second hour and meandered back to a story about auto tariffs, he called himself “The Greatest Weaver of All Time” for what he calls his ability to weave together what he can it often seemed like a series of unrelated points and tangents.

Trump asked his supporters to go to the polls on Tuesday.

“The only way we can blow it is if you blow it,” he said. “I gave you the ball.”