With bombast and defiance, Trump stages first rally since apparent assassination attempt

Donald Trump on Wednesday night staged his first rally since he became the target of a second attempted assassination in as many months, telling his supporters in a sports venue outside New York City that what he called “these encounters with death” had only hardened him.

“God has now spared my life. It must have been God, not once, but twice,” Trump said to loud cheers from the ecstatic crowd.

The former president took his usual ragbag of lies, hyperbole, and dark and racist invective to the Nassau Coliseum in the suburbs of Long Island, just seven miles from the borders of New York City. It was an audacious choice of location, given that there are just 48 days til the election and New York is on neither main party’s list of priorities.

The state is reliably Democratic, having last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984 with Ronald Reagan’s re-election. Even Nassau county, where the arena is situated, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by 54% to Trump’s 45%, while the latest New York state polls show Kamala Harris comfortably ahead of him by double digits.

Yet Trump clearly saw method in his madness. Long Island, the leafy suburbs that stretch east from the city, has shifted towards the right in recent years, becoming something of an incubator for the Make America Great Again (Maga) upheaval.

A large crowd descended on the Coliseum, packing the arena full after hours of waiting in line. Supporters appeared to vie with each other for the most provocative Maga clothing.

Men wore “Women for Trump” T-shirts. Several supporters wore “Fight, Fight, Fight” slogans, which shot to popularity after an assassination attempt against the former president in Butler county, Pennsylvania in July.

One man sported a black T-shirt with a golden bullet etched on it, and the words: “Just the tip, I promise”. Flyers were handed out by a group calling itself “Japan for Trump”, proclaiming that “God chose Trump” and insisting that the former president was immortal and had been George Washington in a past life.

Artist Scott LoBaido next to the portrait of Trump he painted on stage during a rally at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in Uniondale, New York. Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Security was tight, with helicopters buzzing overhead as Trump arrived, police dogs patrolling wooded areas, and the entire perimeter swept – a lesson learned from the drubbing the US secret service has received in the wake of the Butler county and last Sunday’s Palm Beach, Florida shooting incidents.

Despite the violent shocks of recent weeks, Trump took to the Coliseum stage with trademark braggadocio. The arena that once hosted Elvis Presley, Elton John and The Beach Boys now had a new star to accommodate.

“We are going to win New York!”, he boasted to a packed arena, disregarding the polls which suggest otherwise.

Trump returned to the vexed topic of Springfield, the town in Ohio which was the subject of his racist dog-eating remarks at last week’s presidential debate. He repeated his denigration of Haitian immigrants there as “illegal aliens”, when in fact most are legally resident on temporary protected status.

Then he derided the local mayor for offering Haitian children English lessons and interpretation in local schools.

“What the hell is wrong with our country,” Trump spluttered, vowing to pour yet more fuel on the fire by visiting Springfield personally within the next two weeks. A long diatribe about the heinous acts of “migrant criminals” followed.

Other dystopian stories and falsehoods featured in the 90-minute speech. If Harris wins in November, he claimed, New York state “will be like a third-world country, if it isn’t already”.

Trump also got back on his election-denial hobby horse, lying that the 2020 election had been “rigged and stolen”. He called the battle against climate change a “green scam”, claiming that the planet was getting cooler, when in fact this summer was the hottest on record in the northern hemisphere.

As he returned to a favoured theme – – bashing the “fake news media” – what was notable was how the crowd met him, and raised him.

“Fuck you media!” a man shouted within earshot of the Guardian.

“We’ll get you later!”, said another.

“Enemy of the people!”

The last time Trump had the gall to enter New York territory for a rally was May in the South Bronx. The event was designed to highlight Trump’s support among Black and Latino voters – a theme he returned to on Wednesday, claiming that his standing among both groups was “way off the charts, and they don’t know what to do about it”.

What he didn’t say was that recent opinion polls suggest that his support among these critical communities might be slipping following Harris’s entry into the race.

So much bombast. So much adoration. Trump was back in the state he used to call home – at least the Maga part of it – and he was loving it.

“I can save New York in three months,” he bragged. “November 5 will be your liberation.”