Trump’s freewheeling speeches offer dark vision of a second term

On the last Friday in February, the day before the South Carolina primary, Trump took the stage in Rock Hill, S.C., where he spoke for just over an hour and a half. A close examination of his remarks that day offers an anatomy of a Trump rally speech.

Like many of his recent speeches, it was long and laden with resentments, offering a dark vision for the nation that terrifies Democrats and animates his Republican base. It touched on recurring themes, including his election denialism, his promise of a sudden transformation in another Trump term and his claims of persecution and martyrdom.

Perhaps more importantly, Trump’s stump speech provides a road map of what a second Trump term might look like — fulfilling his promises to root out the so-called “deep state” of civil servants, harshly cracking down on illegal immigration and crime, and pulling back from the world stage. It also reveals many of his weaknesses as a candidate, such as sometimes slurring his words, confusing names of world leaders and attacking minorities in offensive ways.

At times, Trump hews to a teleprompter, while at others he careens gleefully off script. He can channel both comedy and rage, charisma and revenge.

Over time, his stump speech has evolved, though certain hallmarks remain. One constant is that it is certain to contain a slew of falsehoods and mistruths, ranging from hyperbole to outright lies, like his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

The Washington Post Fact Checker found that in the four years of his presidency, Trump offered a total of 30,573 untruths — an average of roughly 21 erroneous claims a day.

Themes of retribution and vengeance are also central, hovering like an ominous storm cloud. In a closing riff that has become a staple of every rally, Trump promises to “demolish the deep state,” to “cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists” and to “throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”

“We will rout the fake news media, we will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all,” he declares.

Steven Cheung, campaign spokesman, said in an email statement to The Post: “President Trump is the only one speaking the truth and he’s going to continue shoving it down the media’s throat every single day, and there is nothing they can do about it.”

Trump fans, meanwhile, come hoping to hear his greatest hits, which have changed over time, from a call-and-response about the nation’s southern border to, now, boasting incorrectly of being indicted more times than Al Capone.

Last month, taking the stage in Rock Hill to the tunes of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Trump enthused about the crowd size — “Wow, that’s a lot of people!” — and then he began to speak.

Following the 2020 election, Trump refused to acknowledge his loss — denialism that ultimately culminated with a deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at the hands of his angry supporters.

That hasn’t prevented Trump from returning to what he falsely claims is the stolen 2020 election — or the threat of a future rigged election — a theme that he regularly weaves through his stump speech. He has invoked the rhetoric at each of the 43 rallies he has held since officially kicking off his campaign in November 2022, according to a Post analysis.

Speaking in Rock Hill, Trump first broached the topic of what he dubbed “a failed election” by warning that “the only way it can end where they win is a rigged election,” before noting — again falsely — that what Democrats “did in 2020 is disgraceful.”

It was a claim Trump repeated several more times, including when he accused “Joe Biden and his thugs” of “weaponizing law enforcement for high-level election interference.”

“Joe Biden and the fascists that control him are really the true threat to democracy,” Trump said, taking the charge Democrats have long levied against him and turning it back on his accusers. “Those are the threat to democracy.”

Later, after a riff mocking President Biden as senile, Trump continued: “The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in two-twenty — two thousand and twenty. They rigged the presidential election, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

At this, the crows stood and cheered before breaking into chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

Trump campaigns offering almost a complete alternate reality of what the world looked like under his administration — and what it would look like under a second one, as well.

“Under the Trump administration, you were better off, your family was better off, your neighbors were better off, your communities were better off and our country was far, far, far better off; that’s for sure,” Trump said, less than 10 minutes into his Rock Hill speech. “America was stronger and tougher and richer and safer and more confident.”

“Look what happened to our country,” he continued. “You have wars that never would have taken place. Russia would have never attacked Ukraine. Israel would have never been attacked. You wouldn’t have had inflation.”

In fact, Russia experts and members of Trump’s own administration say that Trump, overall, was notably weak in his stance toward Russia and other autocracies, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin would probably feel more emboldened under a second Trump term. Just last month, Trump said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO-member countries he views as not spending enough on their own defense.

Later in the South Carolina speech, he returned to the same theme, claiming that his “personality kept us out of wars.”

“We would have never had Russia go in. You would have never had the problem that you just had, the horrible problem where Israel — October 7th — where Israel was so horribly attacked. These things wouldn’t have happened because they respected me, but they respected our country. Now they — they laugh at our president. They laugh at him.”

Victimization and persecution

To hear Trump tell it, he is the victim of massive political persecution.

The four indictments? The 91 total charges against him in four federal courts? The nearly $500 million in fees and fines that juries and judges have ordered him to pay? By his telling, Trump is a mere unwitting victim, fighting on behalf of his MAGA flock.

“If I fly over a blue state, the next day, I get a federal grand jury notice,” Trump told the Rock Hill crowd, before adding: “And they indicted me on bullshit. It’s all bullshit.”

A few moments later, he claimed: “I think they truly hate me more than anybody that’s ever lived. You know, it’s all because we won an election — 2016 — that we weren’t expected to win. … All of this persecution is only happening because I am running for president and leading very substantially in the polls.”

At other moments, Trump goes a bit further, arguing that he’s actually happy to be persecuted on behalf of his supporters.

“Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it, actually, a great badge of honor,” Trump said later in the rally.

Then, pointing at his temple with his right index finger, he quipped, “That’s a little different thinking up there, isn’t it? But it is what it is.”

Reiterating a key stump speech riff, Trump continued: “I’m being indicted for you. That’s what’s happened. Never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. I will never let it happen.”

He concluded the bit by portraying himself as a martyr, as he does at almost every rally.

“They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” Trump told his supporters. “And in the end, they’re not after me. They’re after you. I just happened to be standing in their way.”

Immigration and the border

Trump has made immigration and the border a central part of his stump speech and his bid for a second term. In Rock Hill, Trump boasted that under his presidency, “nobody cared about the border because we solved the problem,” and he claimed that “we now have the worst border in the history of the world.”

Trump, of course, coped with a steady tide of illegal border crossings. The Border Patrol made 300,000 to 400,000 arrests a year during most of his term. An exception was in fiscal 2019, when arrests surged past 850,000, pushing the border to a breaking point and leading officials to release thousands of people into the United States.

But it is also true that illegal border crossings have surged to record levels under Biden, in part because the U.S. economy has rebounded faster from the pandemic than those of other countries. The U.S. Border Patrol is taking into custody an average of 2 million people a year, the highest levels in the agency’s 100-year history.

Trump called the arrival of undocumented immigrants an “invasion” — a description that comes up at almost every rally. “They’re taking your jobs. They’re taking your slots on education. Black and Hispanic populations have been hurt more by this travesty,” he declared. Studies show immigrants are a key reason the U.S. economy has rebounded so strongly after the pandemic, which critics say Trump worsened by deliberately downplaying the dangers of covid.

In Rock Hill, he vowed to “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Trump has a long history of anti-immigrant rhetoric. In his speech, he characterized undocumented immigrants as violent, describing them without evidence as coming from “jails” and “mental institutions.” He declared that “thanks to Biden, we now have a new category of crime. It’s called migrant crime.”

Most of those arrested at the southern border do not have criminal convictions, federal data show, and experts say evidence indicates that undocumented immigrants do not cause more crime than legal U.S. residents.

Trump offers a dark and apocalyptic description of the state of the country under Biden. And he has cast anything other than a win for him in November as spelling doom for the nation, often saying that 2024 “is our final battle.”

In Rock Hill, Trump described an ominous vision of what would happen if he lost. He warned of “the largest stock market crash we’ve ever had.” At another point, he cautioned, “We’ll end up in World War III.”

He described Washington as a crime-ridden city, asking the crowd: “Have you seen what’s been happening? Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.” He routinely says the same about other cities and the nation as a whole.

According a database of crimes created and maintained by The Post, for 85 of America’s largest cities and counties, homicide, robbery and aggravated assault went down in 2023, compared to 2022. The District, however, finished 2023 with the most homicides since 1997.

Trump concluded by narrating his view of the state of the country to a song that’s become an anthem for QAnon, an extremist movement that the FBI has designated as a domestic terrorism threat. As the song played in the background, Trump bemoaned: “We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation”

He described the United States as a “third-world nation that has weaponized its law enforcement,” “a nation that is no longer admired, respected or listened to on the world stage” and a “drug-infested nation, crime-ridden nation” with an economy that is “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin.”

A sea of red MAGA hats. Shirts with Trump’s mug shot photo. The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” blaring from the speakers.

For many of his supporters, going to a Trump rally is almost like going to a concert. In interviews, Trump voters often say they go to his rallies not only to see the former president speak but also for the atmosphere and community.

Trump can go off script during his rallies, but he has some go-to lines that draw loud cheers and raucous applause. Among those lines in Rock Hill were Trump’s vow to “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or mask mandate” and his declaration that he “will keep men out of women’s sports.”

The crowd also broke into “USA” chants as Trump said: “We’re going to tell Crooked Joe Biden, ‘You’re fired, get out of here, you’re fired,’” and later when he falsely declared: “They rigged the presidential election and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

As he spoke, Trump gave shout-outs to his fans, like the “Front Row Joes,” who are among his most hardcore rally attendees. He also nodded to his foes, mocking former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and calling Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) a “disaster for the Republican Party.”

He deployed his favorite nicknames, winking to the crowd, “Don’t use the name birdbrain,” as he described his last Republican foe, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who dropped out last week after Super Tuesday. He went to great lengths to enunciate former president Barack Obama’s middle name: “I’m sure you haven’t heard of him, Barack Hussein Obama,” he said, drawing boos from the crowd.

Trump added that he now refers to his 2016 Democratic rival, former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton as “beautiful Hillary.”

“I’ve taken the name Crooked Hillary off,” he said. “I’ve given it to Biden.”

In Rock Hill, Trump continued to mock Biden.

“The guy can’t talk, the guy can’t walk. Remember when he said I’d like to take him behind the barn?” Trump asked the crowd, referring to a Biden challenge in 2016.

“If we were ever behind a barn, I would look at him and I’d go like this,” Trump continued, and then blew into his microphone. The crowd cheered.

Trump often likes to tell dubious stories about his time in office that he argues highlight his negotiating skills — a central part of his projected identity.

One example came during his Rock Hill event, when he claimed he could solve complex matters “with a phone call.” He then offered a play-by-play rendition of an alleged conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, in which Trump claimed Macron wanted to place a tax on American companies but that he stopped it.

“I called up Macron. ‘Emmanuel how are you, how are you,’” Trump recounted, before attempting to imitate Macron’s French accent. “‘Oh, Donald, Donald, thank you so much. I am fine. I miss you so much. We must get together.’ I said, ‘We will, but first we have to settle, you’re putting a tax on our American companies, a very big tax, it’s not fair.”

Trump then told the crowd he threatened to place a “100 percent tax or tariff” on every bottle of wine and champagne coming into the United States, to cheers.

“He goes ‘No way,’” Trump said. “I said, ‘Way.’ ‘No way!’ ‘Way.’”

“He called me back in about two minutes,” Trump continued “He said, ‘We have decided not to place this tax.’”

The reality of the dispute was far more complicated — and it lasted much longer than a phone call.

In 2019, Macron signed into law a digital services tax, affecting large tech companies like Facebook and Google and prompting a dispute with the Trump administration. Trump tweeted in response: “We will announce a substantial reciprocal action on Macron’s foolishness shortly. I’ve always said American wine is better than French wine!”

Robert E. Lighthizer, Trump’s chief trade negotiator, proceeded to release a five-month investigation that concluded the United States should respond with tariffs of up to 100 percent on French goods including yogurt, cheese and sparkling wine.

In January 2020 — when the phone call that Trump is presumably referring to took place — Macron and Trump reached a truce that postponed the tax while the United States held back on retaliatory tariffs.

Clara Ence Morse, Maria Sacchetti and John Harden contributed to this report.