Donald Trump’s rally in Cincinnati on Thursday night was almost identical to any of the hundreds of public speeches he has held since announcing he was running for president in June 2015. He aired grievances and launched broadsides against political rivals and the media. The crowd chanted “lock her up” when he mentioned Hillary Clinton, and “build that wall” when he talked about immigration.
But there was one difference. Trump was holding the rally as president-elect, nearly a month after the general election was held.
The Cincinnati event represented the first stop of Trump’s unorthodox “USA Thank You Tour”, which is expected to take in campaign-style rallies in a number of the swing states whose support won him the White House in November.
But instead of thanking voters who supported him, the president-elect devoted much of his energy to targeting those who had stood in his way. In addition to a familiar tirade against the “dishonest media” – whom Trump particularly blamed for not calling his win in Pennsylvania in a timely manner on election night, as well as for reporting that Trump might lose in states such as Utah and Georgia where he eventually won – he also bashed former rivals. He took veiled shots at Ohio governor John Kasich for not supporting him in the general election, and derided Evan McMullin, a conservative third-party candidate who ran a competitive campaign in Utah, as “some guy”.
He seemed nostalgic for his old foe Hillary Clinton, remarking to the crowd: “We did have a lot of fun fighting Hillary, didn’t we?” He did not directly criticize the former Democratic nominee, although the crowd responded with the chant of “lock her up” that had frequently punctuated his campaign rallies.
The president-elect also returned to the nationalist and nativist rhetoric on which he had based his campaign. “There is no global anthem, no global currency,” he said as he pledged yet again to put “America First”. He blamed terrorist attacks in the US on the admission of refugees by “stupid politicians”, and claimed that an unidentified foreign leader told him “I truly respect the United States again” because of his election.
The former reality television star also resorted to some of his usual showmanship. The president-elect, who has been parading potential cabinet appointments like contestants on a dating show, announced his nomination of former marine corps general James Mattis to be secretary of defense seemingly unprompted from the stage.
“I don’t want to tell you to this, I refuse to tell you, don’t let it outside of this room,” he told the crowd. “I will not tell you that one of our great, great generals, don’t let it outside, we are going to appoint ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis as our secretary of defense and we’re not announcing it until Monday, so don’t tell it to anybody.”
Although the Washington Post had first reported Mattis’s appointment earlier in the afternoon, Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller had firmly denied it, insisting on Twitter only hours before Trump took the stage: “No decision has been made yet with regard to Secretary of Defense.”
As preoccupied as ever with television ratings, Trump boasted that the election had driven down viewing figures for the NFL because “this business is tougher than the NFL. It’s crazy. The people liked it.” The president-elect went on to brag of the election results: “The bottom line is we won. We won. We won big,” with a glee that might have drawn him a penalty for excessive celebration had he been a football player on the gridiron.
The crowd, dressed in shirts and hats that proclaimed their desire to “make America great again” or attempted to reclaim Clinton’s description of some Trump supporters as “deplorables”, seemed optimistic about the president-elect’s chances of bringing change to Washington.
Joe Terry of Cincinnati, a middle-aged man with a old-fashioned buzzcut, saw Trump’s election as “the beginning of a grassroots movement” to reform US politics, which he currently saw as being defined by “a lot of talk and nothing getting done”. Terry was confident that Trump would cut taxes, bring jobs back and “make Washington work again”.
Supporters voiced only one concern about the president-elect: the possibility of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney joining the administration. Jacob Hicks, a student at the University of Cincinnati, said: “It’s the one thing that is kind of upsetting me.” Hicks’s friend Justin, a student at the University of Northern Kentucky who declined to give his last name, echoed these concerns. “Mitt Romney is part of the establishment. He wants to take over Donald Trump and thinks he is better than Donald Trump.”
But Trump was more than willing to make big promises to his loyal supporters. “People are constantly telling me and telling you to reduce our expectations – those people are fools,” he said, adding: “Anything we now want for our country is possible.”
