Former president and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump dances on the stage at a Tucson campaign rally on Sept. 12, 2024. Trump, who boasted he’d had a “monumental victory’ against Kamala Harris in the Sept. 10 presidential debate, rejected her calls for another debate before Election Day. Photo by Paul Ingram | TucsonSentinel.com
Former president Donald Trump told a Tucson crowd Thursday that, when the Nov. 5 election arrives, the nation’s voters would tell Vice President Kamala Harris: “You’re fired, comrade!”
“Everyone will prosper,” said Trump, standing on a stage in the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall in front of an enormous American flag and signs promising a second Trump administration would “make housing affordable again” and eliminate taxes on tips. “Every day will be filled with joy and opportunity,” he said.
Trump said undocumented immigrants and refugees were “raping and sodomizing” American women, and “walking off with pets.”
“We are being conquered and occupied by a foreign element,” said the Republican candidate.
Trump took the stage to the sounds of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and a standing ovation from his supporters, who filled the 2,200-seat venue in Downtown Tucson to capacity.
Trump spoke for about an hour and 15 minutes. Among his remarks, he said undocumented immigrants and refugees were committing rapes and “taking Hispanic jobs, African-American jobs.”
The former president warned that Venezuelan gangs armed with AR-15s were taking over Aurora, Colorado, although Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman told CBS News that although there was some gang activity at two apartment complexes, Trump’s charge was “grossly exaggerated.”
Trump added that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing waterfowl from parks and pets from households, although he stopped short of claiming they were eating the animals, a charge he leveled in Tuesday’s presidential debate.
“They are walking off with geese and even walking off with pets,” he said.
It’s election season, so of course the AZGOP is using a racist lie to scare voters
Officials in Springfield have said there is no evidence of pet theft or consumption, according to the Springfield News-Sun.
“We are being conquered and occupied by a foreign element,” said Trump, who vowed to “begin the largest mass deportation mission in the history of our country.”
On foreign affairs, Trump said if he had been president, Hamas would not have attacked Israel on Oct. 12, 2023, leading to the current conflict in Israel, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.
Trump repeated his boast he would settle the latter conflict “as president-elect,” although he has not shared details of his plan.
He promised the crowd he would install a missile defense system that would protect the entire nation.
Trump vowed to end taxes on overtime income as well as on tips and Social Security earnings. He also said he would lower housing costs by reducing regulations and “opening up new tracts of federal land for large-scale housing construction.”
Trump told the crowd he’d had a “monumental victory” in the Sept. 10 debate against Democrat Kamala Harris and said there would not be another debate.
He called for the ABC journalists who moderated the debate, David Muir and Linsey Davis, to be fired.
Trump said Democrats were falsely tying him to Project 2025, a governing blueprint developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which calls it “a historic movement … to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.”
“I don’t know what the hell that is,” Trump said of the plan.
I think the news needs to show what MAGA really is, which is a melting pot, every race, every culture, together as one, fighting the devil. That’s what we’re fighting. We’re fighting elite globalists.
– Sean Lynch
He repeated claims that he was cheated of his rightful victory in 2020 and said Republicans had to get out so many votes that the turnout would be “too big to rig” the election.
U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who is running against Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, spoke at the rally before Trump.
“I’ve been saying for the longest time that Tucson is ready for a change, and that change is Donald J. Trump,” Lake said.
Lake, a former Phoenix newscaster who lost a 2022 race for governor against Democrat Katie Hobbs, said Tucson was a beautiful city but its “horrible city leadership” had made “every block for miles look like a scene out from ‘The Walking Dead.’”
Lake complained about inflation and said rising prices were putting home ownership outside the reach of too many people.
“The only way we’re going to change that is voting these inept, unqualified fools out of office,” Lake said.
Debbie Anderson, who arrived at 7 a.m. to get in line for Trump’s 2 p.m. program, said she liked “everything” about Trump.
“He’s not fake,” Anderson said. “He loves his people. We love him. You know he’s true blue all the way. And he’s just a great American.”
Anderson’s brother, Sean Lynch, said it was “pretty obvious” why he supported Trump.
“I think the news needs to show what MAGA really is, which is a melting pot, every race, every culture, together as one, fighting the devil,” Lynch said. “That’s what we’re fighting. We’re fighting elite globalists.”
Lynch said he hadn’t been involved in politics before 2016 because he was in the military but he said Trump “woke everybody up.”
Rallygoer Mike Johnson said he wanted to see lower gas prices and a stop to illegal immigration.
“And I want fentanyl to stay where it belongs, in China,” Johnson said.
Trump’s visit was his second to Arizona in the last month as Arizona’s 11 electoral votes remain up for grabs in the November election.
Polling continues to show a neck-and-neck race in the Grand Canyon State. In an average of polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics.com, Trump leads Harris by 1.6 percentage points.
Trump won Arizona in 2016 with 49 percent of the vote against Hillary Clinton’s 45 percent, but lost to Joe Biden in 2020 by less than a percentage point, or 10,457 votes.
Biden won nearly 59 percent of the vote in Pima County four years ago.
Arizona Democratic Party Chair Yolanda Bejarano said Trump had yet to unveil “a concrete plan to lower costs for working-class Arizonans.”
“Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would make it harder for Arizonans to buy a home, would raise their taxes by an average of $5,900, and give more handouts to the billionaire class,” Bejarano said in a prepared statement delivered ahead of Trump’s speech. “This November, Arizonans will vote for Democrats up and down the ballot that have been focused on lower costs and bringing in good-paying jobs to Arizona.”
Last month, Democrats criticized Trump’s Cochise County visit, including U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, who said that Trump was coming to the Arizona border for a “photo op.”
“He’s coming here to take a photo,” Kelly said. “But Arizonans and Americans across the country, they see through this, and they know that there’s only one person who is actually interested in finding some real solutions to solving the issues at our border, and that is Vice President Harris.”
Kelly added that Trump tanked the Border Act of 2024, which would have increased border enforcement and was supported by the National Border Patrol Council. The legislation, crafted by independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, was unveiled in February, but after Trump blasted the effort, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival.”
The morning after the bill’s introduction, the Republican party leader posted on his Truth Social network that “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill, which only gives Shutdown Authority after 5000 Encounters a day, when we already have the right to CLOSE THE BORDER NOW, which must be done.”
Kelly said that Trump “blew the whole thing up. He told Senate Republicans that they were not allowed to vote for this and they didn’t walk away from this legislation. They woke up one morning (and) because of what Donald Trump said, they ran away from it.”
Trump’s appearance to the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall did not sit well with the building’s namesake.
Ronstadt, a Tucson native, took to Instagram Wednesday night to endorse the Harris/Walz ticket, saying it “saddens me to see the former president bring his hate show to Tucson, a town with deep Mexican-American roots and a joyful, tolerant spirit.”
“I don’t just deplore his toxic politics, his hatred of women, immigrants and people of color, his criminality, dishonesty and ignorance – although there’s that,” Ronstadt wrote. “For me it comes down to this: In Nogales and across the southern border, the Trump administration systemically ripped apart migrant families seeking asylum. Family separation made orphans of thousands of little children and babies, and brutalized their desperate mothers and fathers.”
The city of Tucson required Trump to pay roughly $145,000 in advance to rent the Music Hall because his campaign still owes the city $81,837 for a 2016 event at the Tucson Convention Center.