FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (CN) — President Trump’s Monday rally in Fayetteville, N.C., on the eve of a controversial redo election in the state’s 9th Congressional District showed how local politics may have a national impact on the 2020 elections.
On Tuesday, days after Hurricane Dorian ravaged the eastern Carolinas, residents of the currently unrepresented 9th Congressional District will choose their new congressman.
Trump came to Fayetteville to disparage “the radical left,” endorse Republican candidate Dan Bishop, and denounce his Democratic opponent Dan McCready.
“Trump’s reelection starts tomorrow,” Sen. Thom Tillis told the crowd at the Crown Expo Center in Fayetteville.
The state elections board in March ordered a new election to replace the 2018 midterm vote that was tainted by absentee ballot fraud.
Trump followed Democratic presidential candidates Beto O’Rourke and former Vice President Joe Biden, who have made campaign stops for McCready in the “purple” state.
McReady never stopped campaigning after narrowly losing the fraud-tainted election to Republican Mark Harris, who withdrew from the rerun after the mail-in scheme was traced to a Harris operative.
The Tuesday election is expected to be close.
On Monday, conservative social media personalities Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, known as Diamond and Silk, brought the largest round of applause from the crowd.
Their message boiled down to “Just because you are black, doesn’t mean you have to vote Democrat.”
The duo, who are black, called the Democratic Party a “plantation,” from which they removed themselves, and praised Trump’s support for prison reform.
They criticized Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California, and other Democrats, saying: “While the Dems are playing checkers, we are playing chess, and I think I see a bishop.”
Trump adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle then took the stage in front of about 6,000 spectators, saying, “There is a band of socialists competing for the Democratic nomination.”
She followed up that slam with “Democrats have a disease,” and one of its symptoms, she said, is “irrational Twitter outbursts.”
The crowd cheered when she said that Dan Bishop is “pro-wall, pro-God and pro-Trump.”
Guilfoyle is an attorney who previously co-hosted “The Five” on Fox News. She has been linked romantically to Donald Trump Jr. When she delivered handed the podium him they shared a brief kiss.
Don Jr. commented, “I will not get ‘Me Too’d.” The joke was met with laughter from the crowd, many of whom told a reporter that the Me Too movement is a “liberal” one.
Vice President Mike Pence introduced the president. When Trump Sr. took the podium, he put the blame for election fraud elsewhere.
“You go to California, which has so many sanctuary cities, they don’t know what’s happening out there,” Trump said. “You have people that want to get rid of those sanctuary cities, they just aren’t able to do it with the people that get elected. A lot of illegal voting going on out there, by the way.”
As with his claim that he lost the 2016 popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes because of fraud, including noncitizen voters, Trump offered nothing to back up his claim.
Trump emphasized his support for the military, a popular stand in Fayetteville, which is close to Fort Bragg and Pope Army Airfield.
Trump did not mention that North Carolina lost about $80 million in military infrastructure funding when he diverted money to his planned border wall.
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