“If we win, we win the whole thing”, Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania’s Indiana County on Monday, less than two months before election day 2024. Trump spoke for an hour and 40 minutes to a crowd packed into the Kovalchick Center near the campus of International University of Pennsylvania.
The battleground state’s 19 electoral votes up for grabs went to Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign and helped secure his eventual victory, but Trump enters October performing better in national polls than he was four years ago. He highlighted key issues similar to his platform in 2020, but focused heavily on the Biden tenure, and tied Vice President Kamala Harris to the administration’s record on inflation and immigration.
On immigration, he promised that if reelected, he would cease all migrant flights to the state, and again lambasted the Biden administration and Kamala Harris for “open border policies.”
He pinned the 2022 invasion of Ukraine on Biden’s perceived frailties, even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also visited the state to meet with Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was previously considered a frontrunner to be Harris’ running mate. At the time, Trump blamed Shapiro’s Judaism – though Shapiro himself vehemently denies this – on his being passed over in favor of Minnesota’s Tim Walz. He referenced Israel while on foreign policy, calling out the rhetoric of some democrats on Israel’s response to the October 7th terrorist attacks.
Trump also discussed abortion, an issue many voters say is critical this election. Trump pledged to “keep the US dollar as the world’s currency”, highlighting the loss of value of the dollar globally brought on by the inflation of the last three years, which many blame on Joe Biden’s spending policies in the early months of his presidency.
The candidate who has won Pennsylvania has won the presidency dating back to 2008, when Barack Obama won the first of his two terms. Trump drove home the point by promising the working-class population of Indiana County “no tax on tips… no tax on overtime… and for seniors who have been decimated by the stupidity of inflation, we will have no tax on social security.”
