Donald Trump held a rally on Saturday in Wisconsin, one of the key battleground states that may help determine the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. He visited the town of Mosinee as he worked to shore up his base, which includes working-class and rural dwellers.
With 59 days to the election, on Saturday he proposed killing the federal Department of Education. “I’m dying to get back to do this: We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education and send education back to Wisconsin and back to the states,” Trump said to cheers. “We’ll send it back to the states so that Ron Johnson can run it.”
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Johnson has been perpetrating several conspiracy theories, most recently positing without evidence that the federal government might have been involved in the assassination attempt of Trump in July. “When you don’t know the federal government involvement in the JFK assassination, when you really don’t know what happened with Nixon … that might’ve been the second coup,” Johnson told the Federalist Radio Hour podcast on Thursday, via Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The first coup is you take out Kennedy, the second coup you take out Nixon, and then you take out Trump.” He also incredulously blamed large schools for the shooting.
Back in 2022, Johnson also promoted misinformation regarding Covid, claiming that mouthwash and other unproven treatments could kill the coronavirus.
At his rally on Saturday, Trump also fixated on some of his typical personal bugaboos, including crowd size (he’s been particularly obsessed with rally attendance since Vice President Kamala Harris has been drawing high, enthusiastic audiences at the 2024 rallies she’s held since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race).
“This is a big crowd,” he said shortly after the two-hour rally began, noting later that “nobody’s ever had crowds like this“ and he mentioned the crowd size several times during his speech, which included several mispronunciations (he referred to Elon Musk as “Leon” and said “president of the United Spates,” among other foibles). He also revisited his rhetoric on migrants and egregiously claimed women in blue states are executing babies.
He also once again addressed he and his VP running mate J.D. Vance being called “weird,” which he also focused on earlier in the week during a town hall with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. On Saturday, he said the “fake news” called him and his VP nominee “weird,” but Trump accused Harris’ VP running mate Tim Walz as being the “weird” one because he signed into Minnesota law that schools require access to menstrual products in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12. “He is really weird, this guy,” he said of Walz. “Can you imagine, I’m weird?”
Trump has been losing some of his support in several demographic groups since Harris took over the top spot on the Democratic ticket, formally accepting the party’s nomination in August.
Harris is leading Trump among Hispanic voters by 13 percentage points, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted in August, and she has increased her support among Black Americans. However, her support among white voters without a college degree has remained about the same, while that demographic supports Trump by 25 points, per the same poll.
Meanwhile, Harris has raked in record-breaking donations, while Trump has been banking on billionaires to try to put him back in the White House. Trump and Harris will face-off on Tuesday in Philadelphia for their first debate before the election, which will air on ABC News.
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