Donald Trump celebrated his debate night thrashing of President Joe Biden with a campaign rally Friday in Democratic-leaning Virginia, relishing his performance the night before as a sign of increasingly bright prospects for reclaiming the White House.
Clad in his signature red Make America Great Again cap, Trump piled insults onto a weakened President Joe Biden, calling him “grossly incompetent,” and a “train wreck,” while framing the election as a “choice between strength and weakness, and competence and incompetence.”
“The question every voter should be asking themselves today is not whether Joe Biden can survive a 90-minute debate performance, but whether America can survive four more years of crooked Joe Biden the White House,” he told the crowd. “In fact, I don’t know if we can really survive five more months.”
The location reflected the Trump campaign’s belief that it can compete in traditionally Democratic strongholds given his national polling advantage. He has campaigned this spring in blue states such as Minnesota, New Jersey and New York.
While Biden is still expected to win those states, the president continues to lag Trump in key electoral battlegrounds. That includes North Carolina — where the president held his own rally in Raleigh on Friday — and Nevada, a state Trump lost in both 2016 and 2020, and where Vice President Kamala Harris also campaigned earlier in the day.
Trump’s rally in Chesapeake was just 20 miles from the North Carolina border.
He opened his speech asking the crowd if they watched a debate that most commentators believe he dominated.
“That was a big one,” he said to cheers, immediately launching into criticism over Biden’s performance.
“He studied so hard that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” Trump said, noting that Biden had secured his desired date, rules and television network for the debate.
Trump said he didn’t believe that Democrats would replace Biden as their nominee, as some officials in both parties have speculated, pointing out that the president polls higher than Democratic alternatives — name-checking California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Vice President Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama.
The Virginia rally was the first attended by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has largely kept Trump at arm’s length to woo suburban moderates. Youngkin, who recently met in private with the former president, took the stage twice Friday to rally the crowd.
“Mr. President, this is the best Trump rally that you have ever had, and you’re doing it in Virginia,” he said. The governor pledged to “go to work and get you back in the White House.”
Trump focused his 90-minute speech on economic, public safety and national security issues — when he wasn’t bashing Biden. At one point, he veered off to appeal to his far-right, election-denying base when he called for the release of defendants facing charges for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
He celebrated the new Supreme Court decision that is expected to undermine the prosecution of hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants, people he said have been “horribly treated” and whom he has pledged to consider pardoning if reelected.
“Free the J6 hostages now,” Trump said. “They should free them now for what they’ve gone through.”
Trump also used the appearance to urge his supporters to take advantage of early and mail-in ballots, even as he continues to bash the integrity of both.
“Our case to Virginia is very simple,” Trump said. “We will seal the border, we will make the American dream affordable again, but we will bring back the American dream — something you don’t hear about anymore.”
