Donald Trump held a rally Saturday in Wisconsin, a key state that could help decide the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. He visited the town of Mosinee as he worked to bolster his base of working-class and rural voters.
With 59 days to go until the election, Trump on Saturday proposed eliminating the federal Department of Education. “I’m anxious to get back to doing this: We’re finally going to eliminate the federal Department of Education and give education back to Wisconsin and the states. We’re going to give it back to the states so Ron Johnson can run it,” he said to cheers.
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Johnson has been pushing several conspiracy theories, most recently suggesting without evidence that the federal government may have been involved in the July assassination attempt on Trump. “When you don’t know the federal government was involved in the JFK assassination, when you don’t really know what happened with Nixon … maybe that was the second coup,” Johnson told CNN. Federal Radio Hour Thursday podcast via Milwaukee Journal Sentinel“The first coup was to overthrow Kennedy, the second coup was to overthrow Nixon, and then to overthrow Trump.” He also blamed the shootings on big schools.
In 2022, Johnson also promoted misinformation about Covid, claiming that mouthwash and other unproven remedies could kill the coronavirus.
At his rally Saturday, Trump also focused on some familiar personal issues, including crowd size (he’s been particularly obsessed with attendance at rallies since Vice President Kamala Harris has drawn enthusiastic crowds at the 2024 rallies she’s held since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race).
“This is a big crowd,” Trump said before the two-hour rally began, noting that “nobody has ever had a crowd like this before.” He mentioned the size of the crowd several times during his speech, which included several pronunciation errors (he referred to Elon Musk as “Lion” and said “the president of the United States,” among other faux pas). He also revisited his rhetoric on immigrants and made a blatant claim that women in blue states are executing babies.
He also spoke again about calling him and his running mate, J.D. Vance, “weird,” something he also focused on earlier in the week during a sit-down with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. On Saturday, he said the “fake news” had called him and his running mate “weird,” but Trump accused Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, of being “weird” because he signed a Minnesota law requiring schools to have access to menstrual products in the bathrooms regularly used by students in grades four through 12. “He’s really weird, this guy,” he said of Walz. “Can you imagine I’m weird?”
Trump has lost some support in several demographic groups since Harris took the top spot on the Democratic ticket and formally accepted the party's nomination in August.
Harris leads Trump among Hispanic voters by 13 percentage points, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll from August, and has also increased her support among black Americans. However, her support among white voters without a college degree has remained roughly the same, while that demographic supports Trump by 25 percentage points, according to the same poll.
Meanwhile, Harris has raised record donations, while Trump has relied on billionaires to try to return him to the White House. Trump and Harris are scheduled to face off Tuesday in Philadelphia in their first pre-election debate, which will air on ABC News.
