Trump promises landslide victory over Biden in Wednesday visit to Waukesha

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally on Wednesday, May 1, in Waukesha, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson | Getty Images)

With supporters hanging over the balconies and hundreds more turned away at the entrance, former President Donald Trump held a rally in Waukesha Wednesday afternoon where he spent nearly 90 minutes describing “a nation in decline” due to immigration at the southern border, inflation and his legal troubles. 

Guests wait in line to enter a rally with Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump on May 1 in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  (Scott Olson | Getty Images)

Supporters showed up in a variety of American flag-themed clothing:  with MAGA flags tied around their shoulders; in t-shirts, hoodies and hats declaring “FJB”; in Gucci sneakers; and wearing Packers gear and pins touting that they back the blue — all to support their candidate who almost certainly needs a good showing in Waukesha County to win this battleground state in November. 

John Wilcox, a 61-year-old Janesville resident who saw Trump speak for the third time on Wednesday, told the Wisconsin Examiner that Trump has “200 million supporters” because “he says what people are thinking.” 

Wisconsin has played a central role in Trump’s political successes and failures since 2016, when he narrowly won the swing state, helping him defeat Hillary Clinton. After 2020, when he was defeated by President Joe Biden, Wisconsin became a central focus of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, serving as the laboratory in which the Republican plot to cast false Electoral College votes for Trump was developed. On Wednesday, more than one of those false electors, including Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell — who has faced continuous calls for his resignation — was in attendance. 

During his speech, Trump promised several times to blow out Biden in November, once saying that “we’re going to swamp them” and later concluding his speech by saying, “We want to have a landslide that’s too big to rig.” 

Guests shop for merchandise before the start of a rally with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump on May 1 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson | Getty Images)

Trump and the lineup of local Republicans who opened the festivities painted a dark picture of Wisconsin, beset by schools denying the existence of girls, bank accounts gouged at the grocery store due to inflation, under siege from Democrats attempting to game election laws through “Zuckerbucks” and in the midst of an invasion from the country’s southern border. 

For much of the first hour of his remarks, Trump kept to the script on his teleprompter, talking about the “worst border in the history of the world” and “Biden stagflation.” But later in his speech, he went on extended improvisational runs about how “people are absolutely thrilled with the way” abortion policy is working in the country and how if Biden is re-elected, he’ll ​​allow “Gazans from the Middle East” to move into “towns and villages” across the country — bringing an Oct. 7-style attack to America. 

In addition to warning that Biden will allow terrorists to move to the country, Trump also addressed the protests on college campuses across the country against Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 30,000 people. On Wednesday, UW-Madison made national headlines after police cleared protesters’ tent encampments from the library mall. 

“Take back our campuses,” said Trump, who called the New York police department’s efforts to stop protesters on the Columbia University campus “beautiful.” “We want a safe place from which to learn.”

Hanging over the festivities were the legal issues facing the former President, who was in the middle of a midweek dash through the swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan during a break in his New York hush money criminal trial, where earlier this week a judge fined him $9,000 for contempt of court after violating a gag order against him. 

Trump supporters hang over the balcony during the former president’s May 1 rally in Waukesha. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

In his remarks, Trump complained he has a “crooked judge” in that case and that the trial is taking place in a “heavily Democrat area.” Listing his various indictments from state and federal jurisdictions across the country, Trump said the charges against him were like a “third-world country.” 

Prior to Trump’s remarks, Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and election conspiracy activist who has been a regular presence in Wisconsin since joining an effort to oust Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, said that Trump’s defiance of the legal charges against him make him “the most courageous person I’ve ever met in my life.” 

The policy promises in his speech were often broad promises to close the border and make the country richer than ever before. But this week Time Magazine published its report on hours of interviews with him in which he promised to use the U.S. military and construct detention camps to conduct mass deportations of illegal immigrants; appeared open to the possibility of monitoring women’s pregnancies to ensure they don’t receive access to abortion; called for gutting of the federal government’s administrative state, and embraced the prosecution of perceived political enemies. 

Wilcox said that for him and lots of voters, the focus on immigration is exactly what they want to hear from Trump. He added that he’s a “humane person” and doesn’t want to completely close the border like Trump promises, but that there needs to be more controls than he’s seeing under Biden. 

Former President Donald Trump addresses the crowd during his May 1 rally in Waukesha. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

“I get the human aspect but we’ve got to take care of our own people,” Wilcox said. “We have some bad people coming into this country. If we don’t have borders, we won’t have a sovereign country left.” 

The visit Wednesday was another piece of evidence of Wisconsin’s importance to both presidential campaigns. This was Trump’s second visit to the state in a month while Biden has already made three visits to the Dairy State this year. 

Ahead of Trump’s visit, state Democrats held a press conference in the area in which Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, a Waukesha County native, said that the area’s voters — who have been trending more Democratic in recent cycles — don’t stand for the “extremism” that Trump represents. 

“He’s worried that he is losing voters here in Waukesha because of his extreme views on abortion, his extreme views on many other things, and so he is trying to come here to shore up some support,” she said. “But I know my neighbors, my friends are going to reject that extremism. They are not going to vote for Donald Trump this November.”

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