With nine days until the 2024 election, Donald Trump kicked off the final full week of his campaign for president in front of a packed arena at the iconic Madison Square Garden in New York City.
The rally started at 5 p.m. with an A-lister lineup including Tucker Carlson, Dr. Phil McGraw, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Hulk Hogan, Dana White, Elon Musk and a slew of prominent Republican lawmakers and leaders.
“I’m not just MAGA, I’m dark gothic MAGA,” Musk said after taking the stage wearing a black “Make America Great Again” hat.
Two hours after the event began, former first lady Melania Trump welcomed her husband to the stage as the crowd cheered.
‘Honor to Win New York’
New York is not a swing state. Trump trails Democratic candidate Kamala Harris by about 15 percentage points in New York, where Joe Biden won over 60% of the vote in 2020. Nevertheless, Trump made an appeal to his fellow New Yorkers Sunday night.
“It would be such an honor to win New York. Hasn’t been done in decades. Hasn’t been done in so long,” Trump said.
New York has not voted for the Republican presidential candidate since the 1980s.
“They all say, ‘sir, you’re wasting your money,’” Trump said of those who criticized his choice to hold a rally in a deep blue city, but the former president said he disagreed.
Trump was born and raised in New York City and said the Big Apple taught him “that Americans can do anything when they want to. So, no matter our differences, when we work together, there is nothing that we cannot achieve.”
“I love the country,” Trump told the audience in the arena, which t seats almost 20,000. “We want to take it back. I could be right now on the most beautiful beach in the world. I could be at Turnberry in Scotland. I own it. I could be anywhere. I got that greatest … I don’t have to be here, but I would much rather be at Madison Square Garden with you.”
Big Campaign Promises
Trump spent a great portion of his one hour and 20-minute speech talking about two of the biggest issues in the 2024 presidential election—the economy and immigration.
“If I win, we will quickly build the greatest economy in the history of the world,” the former president pledged.
Trump went on to share some details of his economic agenda, including his plan to cut taxes and implement tariffs.
“I will massively cut taxes for workers and small businesses,” Trump said, adding, “and we will have no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security benefits for our seniors.”
Trump also announced a new tax credit plan for “family caregivers who take care of a parent or a loved one.”
With a pledge to incentive American manufacturing, Trump said he would make the interest on car loan payments tax deductible, “but only for cars made in America.”
To bring jobs back to America, Trump said he will “give our companies the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the lowest regulatory burdens and free access to the best and biggest market on the planet,” but only if they “make their product here in the U.S.A. and hire American workers for the job.”
“And if these companies don’t make their products here,” Trump said, “then they will pay a very stiff tariff when they send their products into the United States for the privilege of competing with our workers and our now protected companies. We’re going to protect our companies. They’re not leaving anymore.”
Trump repeatedly returned to the issue of border and immigration throughout his speech, telling the crowd that the border issue is “bigger than inflation, it’s bigger than the economy.”
Customs and Border Protection has encountered over 10 million illegal aliens on America’s borders under the Biden administration. In September, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that more than 662,000 criminal illegal aliens were released into the interior of the U.S. Among those, 435,719 had already been convicted of a crime, with 226,847 more facing pending criminal charges.
“But the day I take the oath of office, the migrant invasion of our country ends and the restoration of our country begins,” Trump said, later pledging “on day one” to “launch the largest deportation program in American history and to get the criminals out.”
‘Just Not Running Against Harris’
Trump repeatedly criticized Harris Sunday night, and claimed he is “just not running against Kamala,” adding that the Democratic candidate is “purely a vessel.”
“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe [Biden] or Kamala [Harris], and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party,” he said.
Trump got personal in his criticism of Harris, claiming “she has a very low IQ individual,” before slamming the current vice president for “humiliating our country in Afghanistan to the war in Ukraine, to the nightmare on our border, to her inflation catastrophe, all done in conjunction with Sleepy Joe.”
Trump heads to the swing state of Georgia on Monday and Pennsylvania on Tuesday.