Donald Trump is back. The former president has made a combative first public appearance to kick off 2022, the year of the midterm elections. To show muscle, he chose Arizona, a Republican state that lost by just over 10,000 votes to Joe Biden in 2020. A year and a little later, he has painted a bleak picture of the country that he governed from controversy to controversy for four years: “It is going to hell It's a disaster. We have to be strong and take back our country and our future," Trump said before a massive audience of tens of thousands of people at an event that has made it clear that the battle for 2024 has already begun.
“Few imagined that [Biden] would be such a disaster,” said Trump, who took to the stage wearing a red cap pulled low to prevent strong desert winds from blowing his hair out for the cameras. “Inflation is the worst in 40 years. The stores are empty, there are no merchandise… the streets of the Democratic cities are full of blood and homicides, there are four times more cases of covid than before”, he listed in a speech that lasted more than an hour and a half and began with a funeral march and a huge message on the screens: Joe Biden is a complete failure.
Trump's circus caused a stir in Arizona. His first rally of 2022 caused a traffic jam of several kilometers in Florence, a city southeast of Phoenix, the state capital, which saw thousands of Trumpists arrive from various parts of the country. Victor, 64, flew in from Las Vegas on Friday night. He wore the typical red
Make America Great Again
cap , but his had an autograph on the brim. "It was signed for me in 2019 by Don Jr. (Trump's son)," says the man, who says he will do his best to get Trump back in the White House. "He's going to clean up this whole mess," he says. It all begins, in his words, with "regaining the House of Representatives and the Senate" in the November 8 elections.
“We need a landslide victory. A victory that the Democrats cannot steal,” Trump told his faithful. The fraud narrative has created a paradox for him that he must now deal with. After more than a year of undermining confidence in the electoral system, a period in which he has not admitted defeat, he now needs the system to gain control of Congress. This has begun in some nuances of his speech. "They must go out into the streets and vote," the former president repeated on several occasions.
"If they want a safe election we must have two things: voting on the same day as the election and paper ballots," he said. The Republicans have promoted in the states they govern, including Arizona, reforms to make it more difficult to vote by mail, something that the Trumpists consider an instrument of fraud. This despite the fact that there is not a single evidence of irregularities in Arizona according to various audits, a recount of the votes validated by the two parties, a dozen court rulings, a certification of security agencies, the approval of the Trump's own attorney general, Bill Barr, the Arizona prosecutor and other local authorities.
Trump's book, however, does not allow turning the page of those elections. All the speakers that preceded the former president tonight ensured in one way or another that the Republican won the election. This has become an unwritten rule for November midterm hopefuls who want your support. “I will never endorse that idiot again,” Trump said this week, referring to Mike Rounds, a Republican senator from South Dakota who said there is no evidence in any state to reverse the result. "Is he crazy or is he just stupid?" Trump added. It is the same deal he has with the current governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, who endorsed Biden's victory. Pejoratively, Trump labels him a “RINO”: a Republican in name only,away from the extreme right-wing positions of his movement.
The former president has already announced his second rally for the end of the month in Texas. Trump uses these events to prepare the ground for his candidates. For Arizona, he has chosen Kari Lake, a former host of the local Fox News network, criticized for her radical positions. The applicant promised, together with her political godfather, to "close the border" with Mexico. “They are invading us. China is shipping fentanyl through Mexico. That ends with me," he said. “And I have a message for everyone who is crossing the border. When I am governor they are going to be arrested and deported,” she said to applause.
A year ago, Mike Lindell, a former gambling and cocaine addict reborn as a mail-order pillow salesman, was greeted by Trump at the White House. The scene marked the moment the character left the fringes of the Trump fan movement to become one of its main spokesmen. Captured then by photographers with notes in a notebook requesting military deployments and a national curfew, tonight he painted a future of hope for Trumpism: “We all know that what is happening God will correct it in his time. There will be no problems with voting machines in 2022."
Lindell charged against the media, but not only against the regulars.
Conservative media have been added to the blacklist.
"These are now our biggest problem," said the businessman, especially underlining Fox News, a network that accompanied Trump during his presidency, but has left the idea that the election was rigged off its screen.
"It's disgusting.
When was the last time you talked about the 2020 fraud?
They don't say anything anymore."
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