“As Republicans, we are well-prepared and ready.”
The surprising comment came from Vicki Westbrook, a mother of five and grandmother of two, who was standing in line outside an aircraft hangar in rural North Carolina on Sunday. . She had come to hear Donald Trump’s speech, one of the final speeches of his 2024 presidential campaign.
Westbrook, 55, said her “locked and loaded” remark wasn’t entirely a joke. She wasn’t exactly frivolous either.
She said she owns guns, but declined to say how many.
Personally, she said, she was trying to avoid any trouble that could erupt after Tuesday’s election. “I have children, so I can’t afford to go to jail. And I don’t like oranges.”
She worries fellow Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters will be tempted to take action if the former president loses the election. “At this point, many Republicans aren’t going to put up with it any longer. They’re not going to let an election be stolen from us a second time.”
Westbrook remains convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. Now, she’s just as confident that Kamala Harris will win on Tuesday, and for one reason only.
“Only if they cheat. I’m absolutely positive about that.”
President Trump has been passionately cultivating such passions for years, and his rhetoric has intensified in recent days. He has repeatedly refused to confirm whether he accepts the vote count, and early Sunday told supporters in Pennsylvania that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House four years ago.
A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that one in four Republican Trump supporters would declare the election results invalid if Trump loses the election and would seek to retake the White House. He is recorded as believing that “whatever is necessary” should be done. This is a sobering finding, but judging by the atmosphere at President Trump’s Kinston rally, it’s a fairly modest finding.
“If Trump doesn’t win, people will riot,” said Cedric Parnes, 38, an African-American Trump supporter. He said it was too dangerous to participate in the post-election unrest and “you would be killed on the spot.”
Instead, he said he is doing everything he can to support Trump by selling products on behalf of the Trump campaign. He has a hat and a T-shirt stole, and some people say, Twice! ”
In the final stages of his 2024 campaign, President Trump is whipping up the passions of his millions of loyal supporters to the highest pitch. In the last three days of his campaign alone, he made four stops in North Carolina, the battleground state won by a Democrat for the first time since Jimmy Carter in 1976 (and Barack Obama in 2008). I’ve only done it twice.
If President Trump is to set clear goals for his return to the White House, he must keep North Carolina in check.
In those frenetic final hours, he pursued a two-pronged strategy to rouse his supporters. On the other hand, he has raised public expectations by claiming that he has a large lead in opinion polls.
“On Tuesday, we’re going to have a landslide that’s too big to dig out,” a weary, hoarse Trump told the Kinston crowd. “We have a big lead. We have a big lead. Fake news, they don’t tell you this. We have a big, beautiful lead.”
In fact, pollsters say he and Harris remain neck-and-neck in North Carolina and other key battleground states.
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Meanwhile, President Trump is laying the groundwork for a new conspiracy to overturn the election results, alleging widespread fraud if necessary. At the Kinston rally, he touted false accusations that Democrats were allowing non-citizens to vote in huge numbers and accused the Biden administration of pursuing an open border policy on the southern border with Mexico. “Perhaps (they) want to continue with the open border policy.” voting roll. Perhaps that’s the reason. ”
Supporters at the rally dutifully parroted Sunday’s lies.
“That’s why we opened the border so all the illegal aliens could come in and vote for Democrats,” said a woman in line who declined to give her name. “There has always been corruption in this country, but I never knew it was this bad. America has fallen into the ground — anyone with half a brain can tell.”
Much like their supporters’ belief in the Democratic Party’s diabolical intentions, so too was their dissatisfaction with what they could do about it. Last time, such toxic sentiments culminated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Kinston rally-goers followed President Trump’s lead in uniformly denying January 6th as an “orchestrated event” in which peaceful, patriotic Americans were lured into a dastardly Deep State trap. . “I locked it up and loaded it up,” said Westbrook, a grandmother who admitted she was at the Capitol that day.
That day, hundreds of Trump supporters, distracted by the then-president’s “stop the steal” rhetoric, stormed the heart of American democracy. Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted in the violent clashes that followed.
Westbrook doesn’t think so. “That wasn’t what they said. Antifa is the only one causing problems, and they were put in us to cause problems.”
This is a burden for American voters. She firmly believes the 2020 election was stolen from her chosen candidate, and now she fears a similar performance on Tuesday.
“Four years ago I was very angry. Now I’ll be even more angry.”
If her worst fears come true and Trump loses, where will that powerful feeling go?
“If he loses, I’ll be scared,” my grandmother said.
