MANCHESTER, N.H. — In the largest arena in the largest city in the state, President Donald Trump hosted one of his signature rallies on Thursday night in New Hampshire, where he weighed into the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary, renewed his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and doubled down on his defense of gun rights.
Trump, who last appeared at the 12,000-seat SNHU Arena the night before the 2016 election, spoke for over an hour and a half to a crowd that lined up at least eight blocks down the closed-off street three hours prior to the scheduled start time on a hot afternoon. His arrival was preceded by remarks from local Republican elected officials and his 6-foot-8 campaign manager — "one of the tallest human beings I've ever seen — Brad Parscale.
Supporters in the second level struggled to hear the Republican lawmakers, a preview of technical difficulties to come as many cleared out of their upper-deck seats to find a better place to listen during Trump's speech. Others yelled "Louder!" through the first couple minutes of his speech, but apparently remained satisfied enough to stay.
Parscale, who strode down the long walkway to the podium hurling Make America Great Again hats into the stand, said that he expected to flip New Hampshire in 2020. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton carried the state by two thousand votes four years ago. He told the crowd that the President was backstage and left them with a simple instruction: "Enjoy the music."
A sequence of classic rock songs followed as the supporters turned their attention to a small black curtain in the corner of the stadium. A long walkway stretched to the middle of the floor, where a small stage stood in the middle of a sea of red hats that extended back to the large roped-off media section. The lower bowl of the minor league hockey stadium was almost completely full and the upper bowl, despite patches of empty seats that some television cameras captured in the background, buzzed with excitement.
As each song ticked into its third or fourth minute, all eyes returned to the back corner. All cameras, lifted above the crowd, were trained on the black curtain. "The animals are getting restless," one supporter in the second deck said after the third song passed and the President had not yet appeared.
The eerie synthesizer and anticipatory lyrics of Phil Collins — "I can feel it coming in the air tonight" — first set the audience on edge. The foreboding sound of the Rolling Stones — "Don't play with me, cause you're playing with fire" — blared over the speakers next. And finally, a blinking and flashing light show for "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC, blasted at an ear-splitting volume, brought the crowd to its feet. The black curtain was ripped away to reveal a flag-draped background and within seconds, Trump entered as the warm and patriotic "Proud to Be An American" washed over the crowd.
After several minutes of cheering as Trump waved from the walkway and paced the stage, the President thanked the Granite State for its role in his unprecedented rise to the White House in 2016. "You remember those primaries?" he asked. "That primary came around and remember what happened during the primary? Trump should come in third or fourth, and we came in easily number one, and that was the beginning."
The double-digit victory legitimized the New York businessman as the Republican frontrunner following his surprise loss to Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses and kickstarted his momentum into Super Tuesday.
While Trump later returned to the 2016 campaign, he quickly pivoted to the 2020 contest. He told the crowd that he was there to launch his reelection bid in New Hampshire and bashed a series of head-to-head polls that showed Democratic candidates "tied" with him in the state. A Fox News survey released that day found all four top-tier Democrats leading Trump nationwide.
The President has one of his lowest approval ratings in any swing state in New Hampshire, which is considered more difficult for him to carry than the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin because of its not-insignificant population of independents and Never-Trump Republicans.
One supporter in the second level, a Manchester resident who attended with his wife, doubted whether Trump would pick up New Hampshire. He said he was "embarrassed" that the state is no longer a conservative foothold in the liberal New England region and blamed recent arrivals — "I won't say from where" — to cities along the Seacoast for tilting the balance.
Trump himself claimed without evidence in his speech that he only lost the state because of large-scale voter fraud. "I hate to tell you we should've won New Hampshire," he said. "That was taken away. New Hampshire was taken away. It was taken away from us." He told reporters before the event that "thousands and thousands of people, coming in from locations unknown" swayed the outcome. "But I know where their location was," he added.
In the early days of his presidency, the conspiracy theory drove Trump to assemble a short-lived voter fraud commission headed by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The commission reportedly found no evidence to the support the claims. The renewed allegations on Thursday night, which called into question whether the President would accept the outcome of the 2020 election if he lost, drew a strong rebuke from the chair of the Federal Election Commission.
As expected for his visit to the home of the first-in-the-nation primary, Trump continued his running commentary on the Democratic contenders, his possible opponents for the general election. "You got Pocahontas is rising. We got Kamala. Kamala is falling. You got Beto. Beto is like gone," he said as he mimicked a cuckoo sign next to his head. The former Texas Congressman suspended his campaign to respond to a mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso, Texas earlier in the month. O'Rourke has also escalated his verbal attacks on the President in recent weeks.
But Trump zeroed in on his most likely opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. "Is there anything better than a Trump rally?" he asked rhetorically. "What about a sleepy Joe Biden rally? Well he's made some beauties. I sort of hope it's him." He later offered a prediction: "I think sleepy Joe may be able to limp across the finish line."
The comments echoed the feelings of his supporters in line hours earlier, who could not wait for Trump to debate Biden in the general election. One repeatedly told others that the part of the line that looped around the block was actually for a Biden event, a punch line that hit close to home for a campaign that has struggled with crowd size. Another complained that the Democratic Party had shifted far to the left and called Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren "just like Hillary but more socialist."
With Democratic candidates hammering his record on trade and inequality every day on the campaign trail, Trump tried out an economic argument for his reelection at the rally. "You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k)s, down the tubes," he said. "Everything's going to be down the tubes, so whether you love me or hate me, you got to vote for me."
But the crux of his message came back to cultural grievance. He complained about the treatment of police officers and sneered that "the radical Democrats" are looking down at his voters. "They view everybody as fascist and Nazis. They used the term Nazi. This was a term, you couldn't even use it. Now they use it like on a regular basis. Nazi," Trump annunciated at the crowd. "He's a Nazi. Think of that. He's a Nazi."
His loudest applause line came when he defended the Second Amendment — and seemed to shut the door on new gun control legislation in the wake of several mass shootings. "It's not the gun that pulls the trigger," Trump repeated from his White House address. "It's the person holding the gun." He instead proposed reopening mental institutions closed during the 1970s and 1980s.
He acknowledged seated attendees including New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. His former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a Windham, New Hampshire resident who has teased a Senate bid in recent weeks, also received a shout-out but did not take the stage as some expected. Trump seemed to endorse the lobbyist and political operative's primary campaign. "He would be fantastic," he said.
"You talk to your family, you talk to your wife and you make a decision," he added. "They're all saying, 'Are you going to support him?' I said, 'I don't know if he's running.' So Corey, let us know please."
As the President continued into his second hour on stage, when he touted his accomplishments on longtime Republican wish-list items like abortion, the individual mandate, Supreme Court justices and military spending, some of his supporters seemed to leave early. Some second-deck sections were largely empty by the end and the floor noticeably thinned out.
Yet with the attacks on his Democratic rivals, voter fraud conspiracy theories and applause lines on hot-button issues, one thing was for sure: one year and three months before election day, Trump is now running.
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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