If today is Monday, this must be Pennsylvania. Or North Carolina. Or Michigan. For the last day of his extravagant campaign, the Republican candidate planned a trip to four cities spread across three states, all of them decisive in this Tuesday’s presidential elections. In total, he planned to cover about 1,800 kilometers aboard his plane, Trump Force One.
It began in the morning, 50 minutes late than the scheduled time, in Raleigh, a university city in North Carolina, a State to which it has dedicated an unusual amount of energy in recent days, as if it wanted to assure it. The plan was to end, perhaps at dawn, with an event in Grand Rapids (Michigan), the place where he made his debut on stage with his vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, two days before the end of the National Convention. Republican from Milwaukee and just a week after suffering the first of the two assassination attempts she has survived during this campaign. The central part of Monday was spent in Pennsylvania, with appearances in Reading and Pittsburgh, the second city in the State.
It made sense: it is the one that contributes the most electoral votes (19) among the seven hinges and the latest polls show an almost perfect tie here between Trump and his opponent, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. In the case of Reading, their interest in courting the Latino vote was added, one of the big issues (and unknowns) of these elections.
He started almost an hour and a half late, and offered one of his classic erratic speeches, during which he attacked Nancy Pelosi (“a disgrace”) and the press (“fake news”) and asked his people to mobilize to vote for him. tomorrow. “November 5 will be liberation day in the United States. And as soon as it arrives [al Despacho Oval] “I will launch the largest deportation in history of migrant criminals: they are like animals.”
“Pennsylvania built the United States and now it is going to save the country,” he said, after painting a false apocalyptic image of the United States on the brink of economic depression, as he has done at every rally. “I have been waiting for this for four years and there is only one day left,” added the candidate defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 elections. Trump appeared on stage with dozens of women behind him holding pink signs that read: “Women, with Trump.” The Republican is aware that the female vote is what can frustrate his return to the White House.
Reading is a town that, like so many others in this part of the country, has seen better days. With about 100,000 inhabitants (68.9%), it is the most Latino in a State that has more than a million Hispanics and almost half a million Puerto Ricans. And there is the explanation for not only why Trump stopped here this Monday to speak before thousands of his supporters at the Santander Arena, where the local hockey team plays, but also why his opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, decided surprise addition of a brief stopover in Reading as part of their particular tour last minute: the vice president had five cities planned, all in Pennsylvania.
Proud of its railway past and for being the place where they invented that mixture of bread and biscuit called pretzelthe fault that Reading has become for a few hours something like the center of world politics lies with a joke: the one the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe cracked a couple of Sundays ago at Madison Square Garden in New York. You know, the one where he compared Puerto Rico to a “floating garbage island” in the middle of the ocean.
Four hours before the start of the event, hundreds of people were queuing at the doors of the stadium, some of them the first since the previous night. There were only a handful of Latinos in line in a predominantly white crowd, and it had its usual share of extravagances at an event of this type, like that man with some kind of rock in the shape of one of those big heads. from Easter Island to whom he had attached a mop of orange hair in honor of the leader.
A couple formed by the Ecuadorian Edison Güiracocha and the Salvadoran Flor Pacheco, residents of Reading since 2010, cited economic reasons for voting for Trump. Also ideological: “We don’t like the ideas that Democrats want to put into children’s heads. What is this about changing sex at 10 years old?” they asked themselves.
A little further away, three friends, Jay and Justin, brothers of Puerto Rican descent, and Kenny, the owner of a grocery store of Indian origin, proud because the website Political had posted a photo of his business that morning to illustrate a report on the transfer of Hispanic votes in Pennsylvania towards the Republican candidate, they considered that there was nothing offensive in the joke about Puerto Rico: “First, he didn’t say it, and second, “That comedian is dedicated to disrespecting others, so I don’t know why people are surprised,” Kenny said. “I was there, in New York,” Shawn DVS 7.0, a young man of Dominican descent who defined himself as “a conservative Christian rapper,” later explained. “When [el cómico] He blurted it out, not many people laughed, it was a bad joke, but not offensive. “Hispanics have voted Democratic for years because they are the ones who gave them all the facilities, but that is changing.”
“That insult to Puerto Ricans changed everything and not only among that community, because when they insult one, they insult all of us Hispanics,” Johnny Cepeda-Freytiz, who is running for re-election as a Democratic state representative in the Harrisburg Capitol and that has given its restaurant Mi Casa Su Casa to the Harris campaign. It is located on the main street of downtown, where the Republican Party also has its headquarters. “There are two reasons why a Hispanic may decide to vote for Trump: because he has been brainwashed to believe that he will come to solve all economic problems and because he suffers from a case of amnesia and does not remember how the things he did when he was in the White House.” Abortion, Cepeda-Freityz admitted, may also play a role, but only among those who do not understand “the concept of separation between Church and State.”
Trump’s appearance in Reading was also delayed. It was scheduled for 2:00 p.m. and around 3:00 p.m. it had not yet made its entrance onto the scene. The question at that time was not only whether he would win on Tuesday, but how he planned to fulfill his plans and, specifically, when he would take the stage in Grand Rapids (an appearance scheduled for 10:30 p.m.), in view of the tendency to offer long and unpredictable speeches. Also that, as he told his followers on Saturday night in Greensboro (North Carolina), he doesn’t know how to do it any other way. “I could come here, talk for 25 minutes and leave, but I’m not going to do it,” he told a mass of his faithful, who stoically endured a two-hour delay.
In addition to the lax management of schedules, the final stretch of Trump’s campaign has been characterized by an escalation in the candidate’s rhetoric, who at the Greensboro rally on Saturday seemed to be amused by the misogynistic comment of a supporter, who said that Harris never worked at McDonald’s, but “on a corner,” and on Sunday he joked in Lilitz (Pennsylvania) with the idea that if they shot him again and the bullets would have to pass through the place where the press was placed ( fake news, he called it) the idea would not “bother” him.
