Former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Mullet Arena in Tempe on Oct. 24, 2024. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
At a campaign rally that was ostensibly aimed at driving Republicans to the polls and encouraging people to cast early ballots, an at times angry former President Donald Trump gave a meandering speech on Thursday that focused little on voting, but plenty on demonizing his enemies.
That included diatribes assailing Vice President Kamala Harris, his rival in next month’s election, Democrats, journalists and immigrants — including a promise to sentence immigrants to death if they kill a U.S. citizen.
This was Trump’s fourth rally in the Grand Canyon State this year. Trump was last in the Valley in August when he touted the endorsement of former Independent candidate for president Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The nearly hour-long speech consisted of many of the former president’s usual talking points around immigration, the economy and attacking the press who he called the “enemy of the people” and “just bad people” Thursday. And while he opened and closed his speech with pleas for supporters to vote early, Trump was most animated when he strayed from his talking points and instead spoke off the cuff.
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The rally, held at the Mullet Arena at Arizona State University in the Democratic stronghold of Tempe, featured a procession of MAGA acolytes who spoke more directly about the need to vote early, a theme emphasized by the signage all around the venue imploring attendees to cast early ballots..
“The people who vote to save this country will be remembered,” Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Gina Swoboda said to the crowd. “Are you those people?”
And Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, who has still not conceded to her election loss in 2022, told attendees that Republican voters need to “swamp the vote” in order to win. Lake, who during her gubernatorial run said falsely that early voting was a vector for fraud, encouraged those in attendance to vote early.
“We can’t have a traffic jam on Election Day,” Lake remarked.
The encouragement to vote early is a sharp change from Trump’s last presidential run in 2020, when he vilified voting by mail. He spent the next several years continuing to complain baselessly that early voting is rife with fraud and is a tool for Democrats to steal election wins from him and other Republicans.
Lake took up that mantle in 2022, and repeatedly told her supporters to show up at the polls on Election Day instead of casting mail-in ballots — even encouraging them to discard their early ballots in favor of voting in person. When polling site ballot printers at some locations in Maricopa County had problems on Election Day, Lake falsely accused the county of intentionally trying to sabotage her campaign.
Lake ultimately lost by 17,000 votes.
But now Republicans and their allies, including groups like Turning Point USA, have been working to both encourage early voting and persuade voters with early ballots to mail them in.
Former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Mullet Arena in Tempe on Oct. 24, 2024. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
In addition to lies about election fraud from Trump and other speakers, there were other signs of conspiracy theories at the rally. Several attendees wore shirts and hats referencing QAnon, the dangerous conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running a global sex-trafficking ring, control world governments and are trying to bring down Trump — who is himself single-handedly dismantling the cabal.
And one man seated directly behind the speakers was wearing a headband and a shirt prominently emblazoned with “WWG1WGA,” a QAnon slogan.
Among the speakers before Trump was Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who assured the crowd that his home state would go red for Trump on Nov. 5. While Florida once was a key battleground state for presidential candidates, Arizona now is one of several hotly contested states, he noted.
“You guys are going to give us a big victory, right?” Rubio said.
He also encouraged the attendees to vote and vote early and joked that attendees should tell those who disagree with them politically to vote on the wrong day.
Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy also spoke on Thursday, saying that the country was in a “war” and that the only way to solve it was to vote.
He invoked violent rhetoric, saying that “2024 is our 1776.” While Ramaswamy said he doesn’t like early voting and would prefer a one-day vote model, he conceded that “we gotta play by the rules we have (in order) to change the rules to what we want.”
Voting may have been the primary theme for most speakers, but anti-immigration rhetoric was also abundant. Lake was one of several speakers who spoke about the desire to have mass deportations of immigrants, suggesting that they could use an app created by Customs and Border Protection to track down migrants.
“Now we know where they are, and we’re going to send them back to their loved ones,” she said. “We’re going to take those planes and buses and send them back to their homeland, because we gotta save our homeland.”
Immigration was the dominant focus of Stephen Miller, a former top advisor to Trump who now pursues legal challenges to voting and other issues with his non-profit, echoed those sentiments. Miller was the architect of Trump’s immigration plans during his first presidency, and the organization he leads now was an advisor on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a far-right blueprint for an authoritarian Trump presidency that calls for mass deportations.
“Twelve days to send back every single last criminal gang — every last criminal migrant,” Miller said to thunderous applause.
Trump used a vast majority of his speech to denigrate migrants and claim that “migrant crime” is sweeping the nation. Those claims are untrue, and numerous studies have found that immigrants — whether legal or undocumented — commit crimes at far lower rates that natural-born citizens.
“We are a dumping ground. We are like a garbage can for the world,” Trump said, later adding that, by getting rid of the “migrant crime,” it will lead to the “restoration of our country.”
Trump also referred to the United States as being an “occupied nation” because of immigration, alluding to a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims that immigrants are being used to replace white citizens.
The moment that garnered the largest amount of applause from the audience during Trump’s speech was when he said he would call for the death penalty for any migrant who is found to have killed a United States citizen, leading to a standing ovation from attendees.
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