Donald Trump is not a man who overly reflects. But on Friday afternoon he cut an equally forlorn figure when he told supporters that after nine years in office he was holding some of his last ever campaign rallies.
“We are winding down,” he told a crowd in Warren, just outside Detroit, Michigan.
‘We’ve been working on it for nine years, right? And now we are winding down.”
Aides have often described how Trump thrives on his rally crowds, emerging energized after entertaining arenas packed with fans for more than 90 minutes at a time.
He has made the format his own since descending the golden escalator in 2015, even adapting it for outdoor airport events during the pandemic-hit 2020 campaign.
Donald Trump was in a rare reflective mode on Friday evening as he told his supporters that his campaign rallies were now coming to an end as Election Day approached.
It all ends on Monday night, with the finale of his 2024 race in Grand Rapids. There he ended his victorious 2016 campaign, an event that his supporters speak of in almost mystical terms.
Trump has said he will not run again. That means that, win or lose, Monday will mark his final campaign rally.
Instead, he said he was making plans for what comes after Monday.
“Hopefully we will move to the next phase, which will change our country,” he said. “Because we have a bit of a mess to clean up, don’t we?”
His mood brightened as he sent his supporters into a frenzy.
As always, they turned the event into a pantomime, engaging in question and answer (“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”), booing villains (Harris and Biden, the “fake news,” various Cheneys), and joining in the punchlines (“Kamala, you’re fired.”)
There were costumes.
On Friday, dozens of people wore sanitary vests. Brave souls arrived in black trash bags, wearing Biden’s stutter or slur (depending on your political persuasion) as a badge of honor.
And the “Front Row Joes” took their usual places, wearing red, white and blue baseball-style jerseys.
While critics compare Trump’s events to Nazi rallies, a more accurate comparison might be a sing-along “Rocky Horror Picture Show” screening at a Midwestern megachurch.
Trump has reshaped the campaign rally in his own image, a celebration of MAGA
With four days until Election Day, Trump appeared at Macomb Community College, Michigan
Dozens of supporters showed up in the kind of high-vis vests worn by sanitation workers, after Trump donned one to troll Joe Biden after he appeared to call MAGA world “trash”
All this topped off with the Village People’s YMCA, one of the most beautiful songs in music history.
It all had a bittersweet feel to it on Friday.
“All I can say is that for many of us it has been the experience of a lifetime,” said Trump, the televangelist in the analogy. “Some of you have been to 300 meetings.
“You’re going to look back on this time in life, you know… you’re going to say there was something very, very special about what we all did together.
“We did it all together.”
Other politicians, he added, might hope for about 300 people in a crowd. “If they’re good.”
The latest DailyMail.com poll of the race gives Trump a three-point lead over Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Supporters showed up in black trash bags, a nod to Joe Biden’s slip of the tongue
Trump routinely fills arenas and convention halls with thousands of supporters
JL Partners surveyed 1,000 likely voters from October 26 to 29. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 points, but put Donald Trump back in the lead after falling behind
But neither candidate is leaving anything to chance as they navigate the seven battleground states that will decide the election.
Trump officials are buoyed by early voting data and polling that they say shows they are in a much better position than 2016 or 2020.
At each rally, Trump characterizes the vote as the most important in history. And on Friday came a warning that this could be the last
‘Because it’s now or never. If we don’t do it, it will never happen again,” he said.
“You know, there are people who say that if we don’t win this election, there may never be another election in this country.
“That’s a positive thing with these radical left-wing lunatics we’re dealing with.”