Former President Donald Trump held one last Virginia rally this past Saturday in Salem at the downtown civic center, just three days before election day. Continuing his recent trend of arriving to rallies late, Trump took the stage over an hour and a half after he was scheduled to. An extensive list of high-profile Virginia Republicans opened up the event ahead of Trump’s appearance including Governor Glenn Youngkin, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears, House representatives Ben Cline and Morgan Griffith, Senate candidate Hung Cao, and 5th Congressional District candidate John McGuire. These speakers all touched on one of the central themes for the evening and a new campaign slogan, “Trump will fix it.”
“We are not racists, we’re not bigots, we’re not fascists, we’re not deplorables, and we’re not garbage. We are Americans,” exclaimed Cao during his speech, earning him a large round of applause from the crowd. This declaration was made in response to a statement by President Biden over a livestream event that “the only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.” All the controversy that has risen out of the many comments about the topic of ‘garbage’ throughout the past couple of weeks has been reoriented into a campaign driver with Trump’s appearance in Wisconsin where he rode around in a garbage truck decked out in campaign advertising. Another of these trucks was parked directly outside of the Salem Civic Center for the lucky 6,500 that made it inside to walk past. Before the rally, the Trump campaign projected an attendance of approximately 50,000 people, however, personnel at the rally estimated that the crowd was closer to 30,000.
“I noticed the amount of excitement and energy was different when Trump got there, everyone was yelling ‘we love you Trump’ and nobody seemed to care that we just waited an hour and forty minutes longer than was promised,” said EMU first-year Justin Hochstedler after the event. Once Trump made his grand entrance, he got straight down to business with the talking points that have played a key role in the lead-up to election day. He strongly highlighted the issues of LGBTQ+ rights, the economy, immigration, and crime. Regarding LGBTQ+ rights, Trump brought out a group of guests located very close to the Salem community, members of the Roanoke College women’s swim team, including senior captain Lilly Mullins who made some remarks. Last year, the team made national headlines over a month-long debate as to whether or not a transgender woman should be allowed to join the team.
“The brave members of the swim team stood up to the transgender fanatics, something new in our country,” Trump said amidst loud cheering from the crowd. Roanoke College issued a statement following the rally, saying that “the College was unaware of [the team’s] participation, and they represent only their individual points of view.” The idea of standing up to the left on election day was a theme that Trump tied into a lot of his talking points, especially in regards to the ballot counting process. Calling out California, a state that has consistently gone blue in every presidential election since 1992, Trump claimed that “if God came down and agreed to be our vote taker for one day, just one day, God would only need one second actually… meaning if we had an honest election in California, we would win California.”
“I think it was pretty cool to experience politics front [and center], and experience a bunch of people really enthusiastic about supporting their candidate,” mentioned EMU first-year Jack Gallagher. Enthusiastic is a very accurate term to describe the crowd, especially when Trump focused on the issues that Virginia is currently facing. Close to the end of his nearly 90-minute-long address, Trump was met with a thunderous uproar from the Virginian mass in confidently saying “We win Virginia, we win the whole thing without question.”
