Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump (R) speaks as former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. listens during a campaign rally at Desert Diamond Arena on August 23, 2024 in Glendale, Arizona. Kennedy announced today that he was suspending his presidential campaign and supporting former President Trump. | Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump held his second rally in the Grand Canyon State for his 2024 presidential election bid Friday, featuring a who’s who of Arizona MAGA enthusiasts, where he spent more than an hour giving a disjointed and at times rambling speech that was aimed at his loyal base of supporters.
Trump, along with a number of elected officials, candidates for office and political power players had been touting the event along with a “special guest” for the past few days. The surprise guest not listed on official flyers for the event ended up being Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who earlier Friday suspended his campaign for president and endorsed Trump.
“He also went after me a couple of times, I didn’t like it,” Trump said of RFK Jr. The two had traded jabs throughout the campaign, though RFK Jr. is rumored to be angling for a position in Trump’s cabinet if he is elected.
The event Friday took place at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, where thousands of would-be attendees waited outside in 100-plus-degree heat with limited cloud cover. As the Arizona Mirror arrived at the venue, two ambulances were seen leaving and more Trump supporters were being treated by firefighters.
Even though cooling centers were available outside to help attendees grapple with the heat, the Glendale Fire Department said that it provided treatment or evaluation to 100 people; an additional 21 people were sent to nearby hospitals.
Would-be rally-goers suffering due to extreme heat also affected Trump’s last trip to the Phoenix area. At a rally in July at Dream City Church in Phoenix, 11 people were sent to hospitals for heat-related issues. Trump has also faced similar issues in other states where attendees were left out in the cold during a rally in 2020, leading to hospitalizations.
The arena, the former home to the Arizona Coyotes hockey team, was the site of a Harris rally earlier this month.
The event included a number of people within Trump’s inner circle and local Arizona MAGA politics. U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who failed in her 2022 run for governor but is still trying to overturn that loss in the courts, spoke to attendees, as did her GOP rival in last month’s primary election, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb.
Other speakers included state Sen. Jake Hoffman, who was indicted earlier this year for his role in a “fake elector” scheme designed to give Republicans in Congress the ability to overrule Joe Biden’s victories in Arizona and other battleground states, Republican Congressmen Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs and Eli Crane. GOP congressional candidate Abe Hamadeh also attended the rally.
A theme among many of the speakers was distrust of the media, the border, “election integrity” and crime.
“You know what is the best thing about speaking at a Trump rally? You don’t need to use AI to make it look like the seats are full,” GOP state lawmaker Justin Heap, who is running for Maricopa County recorder, told the crowd, referring to Trump’s false claim that footage of thousands of people attending a Harris campaign rally earlier this month were faked by artificial intelligence. Harris’ crowd was, in fact, real and not AI generated.
Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk, whose organization hosted the rally, claimed that Harris will bring on “world war three” and called the attempted assassination of Trump by a disaffected conservative 20-year-old man, in which a rally attendee died from a gunshot wound, “the most witnessed televised miracle on television.”
Trump spoke to attendees for over an hour, often launching into personal attacks that he claimed he was told not to do by his staff. He also made bold claims on what he intends to do if elected president, among them making it a crime to burn American flags — an act that has been deemed protected speech by the United States Supreme Court — and creating a “committee on assassinations” to look into the attempt on his life in July. He also said he would release records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Trump also once again attempted to distance himself from the controversial Project 2025, the collection of right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to provide a roadmap for a second Trump administration to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power. The list of policy plans was largely created by former Trump aides and allies.
Even though he has gone from a favorite to defeat Joe Biden to trailing Harris in the polls since she replaced Biden at the top of the ticket late last month, Trump didn’t seem to make much attempt, if any, to appeal to voters who aren’t already committed to voting for him in November.
Recent polling has shown Trump’s fortunes in Arizona reverse swiftly. Harris not only erased the 5.5 percentage point deficit Biden had in the FiveThiryEight polling average in Arizona, she now leads by about 1.5 points, as she has begun to consolidate support among independent voters, Latinos and younger voters — key blocs for any Democrat to win statewide in the Grand Canyon State, and groups that delivered Biden a narrow victory over Trump in 2020.
Before Trump’s rally, Democrats and a former top aide to the late Sen. John McCain rebuked Trump for his connections to Project 2025 and more.
“I’ve been a Republican my whole life,” Wes Gullett, McCain’s former state director, said at a press conference alongside Attorney General Kris Mayes and other Democratic leaders. “Today, the Republican Party is a cult of personality.”
Gullett said Trump’s plans for a second term would add to the national debt and be detrimental to the middle class by levying tariffs that would “be passed along from companies to consumers.”
“Now, more than ever, we need to put country over party,” Gullett said. “My old boss John McCain always said, ‘Country first.’”
Mayes said if Trump is elected, she and other Democratic AGs have “a plan” to fight back against proposals that make up Project 2025 and Trump’s platform, including policies that would sharply restrict access to reproductive health care.
“What Donald Trump and his allies have laid out…says everything about what his administration would be like,” Mayes said. “We will be ready to stop him from destroying our constitution.”
At the rally, Tino Rodriguez, who was helping his sister sell Trump-themed merchandise, said that the recent Democratic National Convention did nothing to sway him away from Trump.
For Rodriguez and the others in his family, illegal immigration is their “No. 1” issue.
“I’m more about Trump than ever,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez also said that learning that Trump helped kill bipartisan legislation aimed at addressing issues at the border did not persuade him away from Trump at all. His family agreed. They also saw the endorsement of RFK Jr. as a boon to Trump’s campaign.
Others did not see it that way.
“This is not a big deal at all,” Gullett said about the endorsement, adding that Trump just “added another weird guy to the team of weird guys.”
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: [email protected]. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and X.
