Trump returns to Atlanta in final push for votes: ‘We’ve got to finish it off’

Donald Trump yet again descended upon Atlanta with a week and a day to go, looking for votes in a state that is rapidly running out of voters to woo.

“I do hear the votes are coming in very nicely,” the former president said. When he asked the crowd who had voted, about half raised their hands and cheered. “We’ve got to finish it off.”

Just before Trump took the stage on Monday afternoon across the street from the CNN debate stage that took Joe Biden out of the race, Georgia’s early vote count crossed the 3m mark. More than 40% of Georgia voters have already cast a ballot. About 5 million people voted in Georgia’s 2020 presidential race.

Trump refrained from his regular practice of trashing Atlanta, though he disparaged Fulton county’s district attorney Fani Willis and the election interference charges he still faces, referring to “Fani and her boyfriend” attempting to lock up their “political opponent”.

He described the Harris campaign as one of “demonization and hate”, then referred to her “radical, lunatic left policies”.

“They say: ‘He’s Hitler.’ They say: ‘He’s a Nazi.’ I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” he said. “How can Kamala Harris lead America when she hates Americans? … They’re very bad people who are a threat to democracy.”

Trump took issue with recent criticism made by Michelle Obama. “She was nasty,” Trump said.

But Trump generally stuck to familiar themes about how unauthorized immigrants are “savages” and “monsters” who are “destroying this country”, the perils of accepting transgender surgery and the size of his rallies. He said he would support a tax credit for family caregivers – a new economic proposal with eight days to go in the election.

Racist comments yesterday by a conservative comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City overshadowed whatever message the campaign intended to present. Critics on the left had widely likened the event to the Nazi party rally held there in the run-up to the second world war, building on reports from his former officials that Trump had admired Hitler’s general officers and wished his own generals had been like them.

In warm-up comments before Trump’s appearance, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene complained about how the Madison Square Garden rally Sunday night had been portrayed in the media.

“That rhetoric right there is why I get death threats,” Greene said. “We’re fed up with being called Nazis and fascists. They’re absolutely lies, and we’re not going to take it anymore,” suggesting that conservatives should launch a class-action lawsuit to muzzle this criticism.

The crowd at McCamish Pavilion on Georgia Tech’s campus skewed much younger than most rallies held near Atlanta over the last month. Perhaps a quarter of those attending were Georgia Tech students or recent graduates.

Though Georgia Tech students have a longstanding tradition of stealing the letter T from every sign they can on campus, Trump’s signs were not apparently so affected.

And yet, Lt Gov Burt Jones had the temerity to joke about how Kirby Scott, coach of the University of Georgia football team, was a gift from God while speaking to an arena full of Georgia Tech students on their own campus.

Georgia Tech tends to be a much less politically active campus than the state flagship University of Georgia, or Georgia State University a couple of miles east of campus, or Emory University, which held raucous protests about the war in Gaza earlier this year.

That said, a group of pro-Palestinian students set up an enormous display of flags marking the death of Gazans in the center of Georgia Tech’s campus in advance of Trump’s visit. The demonstration had less to do with Trump’s presence than the general call for the school to disclose and divest from investments in Israel, said Renee Alnoubani, a civil engineering student at Georgia Tech.

“We should be talking about the war in Gaza every day,” she said.

Brothers at the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house, down the street from the rally, held a fundraiser for the St Baldricks Foundation and children’s cancer research, calling on people walking by to “vote” for their preferred candidate by dropping money into boxes marked either “Harris” or “Trump”.