Given that President Trump has continued to campaign and fundraise after his loss in November — and given his obvious satisfaction in front of a crowd of supporters — it’s unlikely that he will completely stop holding rallies once out of office. However, his Monday night performance in Dalton, Georgia, represents the final event of his presidency in which Trump will have an opportunity to mobilize his supporters ahead of an election. Soon, his rallies will have no campaign to make them relevant.
In Georgia to support Republican candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the runoffs on Tuesday, it turns out that Trump was the only Republican who could reliably count on his own support during the meandering speech. The day after facing intense scrutiny for pressuring the Georgia secretary of State, a Republican, to “find” just enough votes to change the results, Trump went after several GOP figures whom he deemed unsupportive of his weak postelection coup. Below are some of the more egregious moments from the last Trump rally that matters — at least until the 2022 midterm.
Trump appeared to forget candidate David Perdue is in quarantine
It didn’t take long for the president to forget that one of the Republican candidates he was campaigning for was not in attendance because he is in quarantine after coming into close contact with someone with the coronavirus last week.
“Together, we’re going to defeat the Democrat extremists and deliver a thundering victory to David Perdue,” Trump said, asking, “Where’s David, David, David? We love our David, I know David so well.”
Trump said he doesn’t “do rallies for other people” at a rally for other people
Similar to his odd statements during the campaign that he didn’t want to have to be in some swing states, the president said he wasn’t thrilled by the fact he had to be in north Georgia on someone else’s behalf on Monday night. “I don’t do rallies for other people,” he said. “I do rallies for me.”
Trump vowed to return to Georgia in 2022 — to campaign against Republicans
Twice during the rally, the president said he would be in Georgia in the midterms to drum up his supporters to vote against Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, because the pair did not accept his baseless allegations of election fraud:
Trump joked that even Mike Pence isn’t safe from his ire
“I hope Mike Pence comes through for us,” Trump said, of the doomed effort on Wednesday to overturn the election results in Congress. “Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I don’t like him quite as much. No, Mike is a great guy.”
Trump gets the crowd to boo Fox News
As he vented about not being able to overturn the election, the president set up his former favorite network for a moment of heckling:
Trump says he’s ‘a little angry’ at Utah Republican Mike Lee
As the president noted some of the VIP guests in the crowd, he passed over the senior Republican senator from Utah fairly quickly, because he has not supported the effort to object to the election’s certification in Congress on
Wednesday. “Mike Lee is here, too,” Trump said. “But I’m a little angry at him.”
“Everyone loved my phone call”
When he wasn’t insulting other Republicans or listlessly endorsing Tuesday’s candidates, Trump spent much of his time onstage complaining about his loss in Georgia and other states that flipped blue in November. While Trump has been doing so in public for two months now, he is now facing potential legal exposure for a recording of a Saturday phone call in which he threatened Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find’” the votes to tip the state in his favor. Though he may have violated state and federal law surrounding the solicitation of election fraud, Trump played as if nothing was wrong:
