Donald Trump is getting a rude awakening that his grip on the GOP isn’t absolute.
Over the past 48 hours, 38 House Republicans rejected the stopgap spending bill that the president-elect publicly threw his weight behind after tanking Speaker Mike Johnson’s original proposal to keep the federal government running past Friday. Their defiance came even as Trump and his allies threatened to field primary challenges against GOP members who didn’t fall in line.
Then, on Friday night and early Saturday, the House and Senate passed a different version of the spending plan — one that didn’t include Trump’s demand to extend or end the debt limit.
It’s the latest example of Trump confronting the limits of his power, especially over his own party. Senate Republicans already dealt Trump a massive blow when a handful of them made clear they wouldn’t support Trump’s first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, leading to him withdrawing. And that was after they chose John Thune over Rick Scott for Senate GOP leader against the wishes of Trump’s allies.
Taken together, rank-and-file Hill Republicans’ early rebuffs of Trump show the party is far from total lock-step with the president-elect.
“For a long time there were always calls for ‘who in the Republican Party will ever stand up to Trump?’ And now we certainly have it. But it may not be in an ideal way,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and appointee in Trump’s first administration.
“This is an inflection point: How Trump responds from outside the caucus, how he deals with those who are not ready to make deals … this is really just prepping the battlefield and testing the waters for the next four years to come,” Bartlett said.
Trump’s push to get Republicans to accede to his demands ran headlong into longstanding GOP resistance to suspending the debt ceiling. Doing that is a huge ask of fiscal conservatives, and viewed through that lens, it’s unsurprising that the bill went down.
While Trump had hailed the reworked deal as “SUCCESS in Washington” and urged “All Republicans, and even the Democrats” to vote for the bill that he called “VITAL to the America First Agenda,” some in his party broke rank.
“Republicans campaigned on cutting spending and reducing the $35 trillion national debt. You can't achieve that by suspending the debt limit,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) wrote on X on Thursday. “Until President-elect Trump takes office, I won't grant Joe Biden an extension on an unlimited debt ceiling.”
Rep. Greg Lopez (R-Colo.), another Republican who opposed the bill Thursday, said in a statement that he could not back a continuing resolution “that does not consider our nation's growing $36 trillion debt and removes the debt ceiling, creating an open check book for Congress to spend more money it already doesn't have.”
And Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) said on X that “ending reckless spending and tackling the national debt immediately” is what will allow Trump to “shake up the status quo.”
“I understand President Trump’s concern that a debt ceiling fight will delay the implementation of his agenda but to Make America Great Again, we have to end business as usual in Washington right here, right now,” McCormick wrote.
Their resistance is an early indicator of areas in which Republicans are willing to break with Trump on policy — and a warning sign that while the incoming president has enjoyed broad sway over Johnson, that influence may not extend to every member in the party’s rank-and-file on every vote. And with such a slim majority in the House, the defiance of just a few Republicans can have an impact.
“We talk about MAGA, Freedom Caucus, etc., but there’s a sizable chunk of the conference that are OG Tea Partiers,” said Doug Heye, a GOP strategist and Hill alum. “Raising the debt ceiling tests the boundaries of what is otherwise an enormous influence over the party.”
A person close to Trump, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, characterized the outcome as a win for the president-elect because it showed the whip count within the caucus and “eliminated a bunch of the pork.”
And Johnson, speaking to reporters after the House vote, signaled that Trump was on board with the reworked spending plan. Johnson was in “constant contact” with Trump, he said, and the president-elect “knew exactly what we were doing and why.”
But Trump has been prodding Johnson to deal with the debt ceiling for over a month, the person close to the incoming president said. And in the hours after his preferred deal went down in flames, he began advocating to push out the debt ceiling even further — to 2029.
The spending debacle has left some Republicans concerned that, like in his first term, Trump may not be able to get as much done as hoped because, they say, he is focused on the wrong things.
One person close to Trump, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly, worried the president-elect’s decision to use his political capital to unsuccessfully try to pass a new funding bill suspending the debt ceiling could echo back to his failed attempts to kill Obamacare early in his first term — instead of pursuing a more popular policy such as an infrastructure overhaul.
“I’m hoping we’re not in that same spot right here,” the person said.
Democratic attorneys general are preparing a raft of legal actions to prevent Donald Trump from carrying out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, setting the stage for a series of showdowns over one of his central campaign pledges.
In interviews with POLITICO, six leading blue-state prosecutors said they are girding to take Trump to court over misusing military troops on domestic soil, attempting to commandeer local or state law enforcement to do the job of the federal government and denying people’s constitutional right to due process.
The attorneys general also said they would move to challenge Trump if he tries to federalize the National Guard — or attempts to direct active-duty military units or National Guard troops from red states into blue states. They are bracing to push back against his administration sending immigration agents into schools and hospitals to target vulnerable populations.
And they are preparing to fight Trump over withholding federal funding from local law enforcement agencies in an attempt to induce them into carrying out deportations, as he did unsuccessfully in his first term.
The attorneys’ preparations underscore the depth of concern among blue-state leaders about Trump’s deportation plans and foreshadow the major role state prosecutors will continue to play in shaping the country’s immigration policy. Following a rash of red-state challenges to President Joe Biden’s immigration agenda over the last four years, it’s now blue-state attorneys who are positioned to set off another round of legal clashes — this time intended to stymie Trump on his signature issue.
“There are ways to [handle immigration] that are in line with American values and conform to American law. But they don’t seem to be interested in pursuing that,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a former federal prosecutor who has experience in immigration enforcement, said of Trump and his allies. “And that’s where someone like me has an important role to play.”
MOVES AND COUNTERMOVES
While some have dismissed Trump’s pledge to carry out the largest deportation in American history as infeasible, Democratic attorneys general are taking the incoming president at his word. They are preparing briefs and analyses and even identifying courts in which to file their lawsuits as they brace for him to begin rounding up undocumented immigrants, who number some 11 million, en masse.
It is setting up a legal chess match between a president-elect looking for new ways to press the limits of executive power and a cadre of state prosecutors already familiar with his playbook and adapting to changes in his approach. And it is unfolding amid broader shifts in the politics of border security.
The incoming president’s policy team is already thinking about how to craft executive actions aimed to withstand the legal challenges from groups and state prosecutors — all in hopes of avoiding an early defeat like the one that shuttered his 2017 travel ban targeting majority-Muslim nations.
But each step Trump takes during his transition — stacking his Cabinet with immigration hardliners who have pledged to carry out his calls for large-scale deportations, and confirming he intends to both declare a national emergency and use the military in some form to aid his plans — gives Democrats more clues about how to attempt to block his efforts once he takes office.
Trump pledged on the campaign trail to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite the removal of immigrant gang members. He is expected to end parole for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and deactivate a mobile phone application called CBP One that migrants could use to set up appointments to seek asylum.
His border-czar-in-waiting, former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan, has vowed to ramp up workplace raids. His incoming deputy chief of policy, Stephen Miller, has spoken of deputizing the National Guard as immigration enforcement officers and even sending troops across state lines to circumvent any resistance efforts. While federal law largely prohibits using military forces for domestic law enforcement, Miller last year identified a workaround — the clause in the so-called Insurrection Act that gives the president power to deploy the military on domestic soil in times of turmoil.
And on Monday, Trump confirmed in a social media post that he intends to declare a national emergency and marshal military assets to help execute deportations.
State prosecutors argued in interviews that those plans are on shaky legal ground. And talk of using the military has already spurred policy divides between the incoming president and Republican lawmakers, with libertarian-leaning GOP Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) saying this week that Trump’s plan to carry out mass deportations with the military’s help would be a “huge mistake” — an early sign that Democrats might have some allies on this front.
“I don’t think the theories that they have comport with federal laws, so there would be a direct challenge to the legal basis the president would use to deploy the United States military,” Torrez said.
“Separate and apart from the legal arguments that we would be advancing in court, I think there’s a broader context that most Americans are simply not comfortable and do not support utilizing military assets in that way,” Torrez added.
WHERE TO PUSH BACK — OR NOT
Attorneys general aren’t planning to stand in the way of lawful immigration enforcement. In many cases they will work with federal authorities to address public safety threats and to help catch and deport criminals — as they have in the past. And even as they prepare for what they cast as potential overreach from a second Trump administration, they note that their next steps largely depend on how the president-elect implements his plans, which is difficult to predict.
Trump’s advisers have suggested the Republican administration will take a more “targeted” approach to deportations, starting with those who are known or suspected national security threats and who have criminal records. But attorneys general are skeptical he will stick to that. And they are fearful he could begin targeting both undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for a decade or more and have established roots, or those who entered the country through legal pathways — scenarios they warn could lead to family separation and cause chaos in some communities.
“If he’s going to want to achieve that type of scale, the largest deportation in U.S. history, as he says, by definition he’s going to have to target people who are lawfully here and … go after American citizens,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin said. “And we’re not going to stand for that.”
Trump pledged on the campaign trail to begin his deportation push in Aurora, Colorado, the Denver suburb he routinely depicted — despite pushback from locals — as a “war zone” that had been “invaded and conquered” by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Phil Weiser, the state’s attorney general, said he will be “laser-focused” on determining whether Trump’s immigration officials are denying people due process — a move he called “unAmerican.”
Attorneys general from Colorado to California are also preparing for repeat battles over federal funding. Trump threatened throughout his first term to withhold funding from states and cities with so-called sanctuary policies that limit local law enforcement’s interactions with federal immigration authorities. His administration also attempted to attach immigration-enforcement conditions to grants for local law enforcement — and lost in court.
“We won’t take that lying down, just as we didn’t last time,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.
In response to a request for comment for this story, Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said in a statement that the president-elect has “nominated the most highly qualified and experienced attorneys to lead the Department of Justice” and “focus on enforcing the rule of law.”
Democratic prosecutors’ resistance will extend beyond the courtroom. Advocacy groups such as the ACLU are already pushing attorneys general to use other tools at their disposal — such as issuing guidance to state and local agencies about how to handle immigration requests from the federal government — to attempt to slow implementation of Trump’s immigration actions.
And attorneys general are already embarking on a messaging campaign both against Trump’s broad characterizations of migrants as “blood thirsty” criminals and in support of immigrants who are contributing to local communities. They are also joining other Democratic leaders in starting to cast Trump’s deportation plans as potentially harmful for the economy he has pledged to improve, drawing a direct line between the immigrant workforce that helps drive the nation’s agriculture industry and higher prices at the grocery store.
Trump has created the narrative “that every immigrant who is here in, say, Massachusetts, or this country, illegally is committing crimes,” said the state’s attorney general, Andrea Campbell. “It’s just not true.”
Shia Kapos and Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.
Democrats are deeply divided on how aggressively to resist President-elect Donald Trump and his allies. While some are taking a conciliatory approach to the incoming Republican trifecta, others are vowing to thwart their policies with every legal and legislative tool available.
It’s a moment those in the resistance camp — many with grander political ambitions — have been preparing for behind the scenes for many months.
Those preparations were aided by Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that outlined a policy wish-list for the next Republican administration, from slashing environmental regulations to issuing a national abortion ban.
Blue states began “Trump proof-ing” programs anticipated to be under attack by the federal government and beefing up teams of lawyers who will battle the new administration in court.
Now, those resistance Democrats — including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison — have a message for the latest installment of the Trump era: Bring it on.
“Violating the law, that is something [Trump] cannot find his way to stop doing — it’s part of his brand, it’s part of what he does,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is expected to run for governor in 2026, said in an interview. “If he doesn’t break the law, there is nothing for us to do, and he will be a law-abiding president. But we don’t expect that.”
These hostile counterforces represent just one segment of the Democratic Party, as its leaders strategize how to confront Trump when he reenters the White House backed by full GOP control of Congress. Some governors are taking a less combative approach, expressing a willingness to cooperate with the president-elect on certain fronts — at least for now.
Here’s a look at the pillars of the movement assembling to undercut Trump and his allies, a collection of Democratic governors, attorneys general and aligned interest groups.
Governors
Expect to see Newsom cement his standing as the lead Democrat fighting the feds. Newsom and Trump are old foes — and that rivalry is guaranteed to flare up as Trump reenters the White House and Newsom lays the groundwork for a potential 2028 presidential run.
Newsom has already begun to position California as the bulwark against the incoming Republican trifecta. Two days after the election, he called a special session of the state Legislature to protect California initiatives likely to be targeted by Trump, like civil rights protections and climate policies.
Beyond Newsom, keep an eye on the newly-formed nonpartisan group focused on countering “threats of autocracy” that was launched by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. The pair of governors say they’re talking to other Democrats and Republicans about joining the effort, which will have its own staff and researchers.
“You come for my people, you come through me,” Pritzker warned Trump in a post-election press conference.
Polis set up that group even as he heaped praise on Trump’s provocative pick for Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaking to the complex balancing act governors must face these next few years with Trump in power.
Don’t discount the newcomers, either. Governors who entered office after Trump’s first term are joining the ranks of the resistance effort — though they’re doing so less overtly than some of their longer-serving peers.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul launched a program aimed at addressing “policy and regulatory threats” from the Republican administration and pledged to beef up coordination with her state’s attorney general to protect “New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms.” But she also phoned Trump to press her case for federal funding for key projects across the state.
Then there’s Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who burnished her profile by repeatedly suing the Trump administration in her prior role as the state’s attorney general but largely retreated from the national spotlight after he left office. After Trump’s election, she roared back onto MSNBC with calls to “hold the line once again on the rule of law” and vows that state police would not comply with Trump’s mass deportation plans.
Attorneys General
When Trump issued the ban on Muslim travelers to the U.S. in the initial days of his first presidency, Democratic attorneys general offices were caught off guard. They scrambled to join together to file a multi-state lawsuit — kicking off an era of intense litigation between the states and federal government.
Those same offices don't intend to be surprised again.
“We’ll be more ready for this work,” Weiser said in an interview. “We know a little bit more the nature of what’s coming.”
Watch California’s Bonta, Minnesota’s Ellison, New Jersey’s Matthew Platkin and New York’s Letitia James as likely leaders of the litigation movement. "I didn't run for attorney general's office twice so that I could sue Trump. That's not what I'm here for," Ellison said at a recent press conference. "But if he violates the rights of people, we're gonna sue, it's simple as that."
Also keep an eye on the new crop of attorneys general from states that played a big role in prior lawsuits against Trump, like Dan Rayfield in Oregon and Nick Brown in Washington.
These offices will leverage their large staff of attorneys to likely challenge nearly every move from the Trump administration. In the days since the election, some offices have issued an open casting call to expand the ranks of their litigation attorneys, posting on Linkedin that “the need for the best and brightest lawyers to join us has never been greater.”
But while those attorneys general may be more practiced suing Trump this time around, they face more institutional and political challenges that could make it difficult to prevail in court, namely a more conservative Supreme Court that Trump has played a major role in shaping. The president-elect also has the backing of more Republicans in Congress who will likely look to use their majorities in both chambers to pass legislation superseding state laws.
Interest Groups
While Democratic governors worried about their own political futures might not want to be the face of fighting Trump on every front, interest groups that have that as their sole mission will be more than happy to practice scorched earth tactics to stymie the administration.
Democracy Forward, a liberal legal organization launched during the first Trump administration, intends to continue its work challenging federal rules — and this time is armed with a much larger staff and multi-million dollar war chest. Its board members include Democratic legal bigwig Marc Elias and Ron Klain, former chief of staff to President Joe Biden.
There will be plenty of conflict in the abortion space. Trump pledged to veto a national abortion ban should one hit his desk. But Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the vice president-elect, suggested on the campaign trail that the Republican administration would defund Planned Parenthood, telling reporters that “we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions.”
A slate of political groups supporting abortion rights — EMILYs List, National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Freedom for All — issued a post-election memo in which they vowed to hold Trump and “all anti-abortion politicians accountable for what they have already done and what they plan to do to destroy reproductive freedom.”
In the immigration arena, the American Civil Liberties Union fired its initial warning shot against the Trump administration by filing a lawsuit on Monday seeking more information about how authorities might quickly deport people from the U.S.
Trump officials are thinking about how to construct executive actions aimed to withstand the legal challenges from immigrants’ rights groups — a strategy intended to avoid the pitfalls of the first Trump term, like when civil rights groups and state attorneys general successfully delayed implementation of various versions of the Muslim travel ban.
Watch the activities of climate organizations like EarthJustice and the Sierra Club, who are bracing for the continued reversal of dozens of environmental rules dealing with everything from air pollution limits to drilling in protected areas.
“We are even stronger now, and we’re ready,” EarthJustice, which sued the Trump administration more than 130 times and won the vast majority of court decisions, said in a statement after the election was called for Trump. “We will see Donald Trump in court.”
Donald Trump pledged in one of his final campaign speeches to work with Democratic mayors and governors if reelected. But just hours after the former president was projected to win back the White House, some blue-state leaders were actively plotting against him.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of Trump’s fiercest critics, on Thursday called a special legislative session to funnel more resources toward the state’s legal defenses to preemptively combat Republican policies around immigration, the environment, LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive care.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James — one of Trump’s most aggressive first-term adversaries — pledged to beef up coordination between their offices to “protect New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms from any potential threats.”
And attorneys general across blue states are prepared to take Trump to court — just as their predecessors did hundreds of times during his first administration.
If Trump’s reelection represented a realignment in American politics, blue-state leaders are choosing to confront it with a return to form, resuming the counterweight roles they played during his first administration as their party reckons with a nationwide repudiation.
“We've been talking for months with attorneys general throughout the nation, preparing, planning, strategizing for the possibility of this day,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference in San Francisco on Thursday.
Trump’s two-year campaign to retake the White House — and polls that for months showed he could succeed — gave Democrats the lead time they lacked in 2016 to shore up their defenses against conservative policies. And they are using as a guide his campaign-trail calls for mass deportations and regulatory rollbacks, as well as Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a Republican administration that Trump has distanced himself from but that dozens of his former administration officials had a hand in crafting.
Governors and lawmakers in several blue states have already passed laws bolstering reproductive rights since the fall of Roe and stockpiled the abortion pill mifepristone in response to further legal threats to reproductive care. While Trump has vowed to veto a national abortion ban, that’s hardly alleviated Democrats’ fears. And as he barreled toward a second term, they raced to address other areas of concern, pushing ballot measures to protect same-sex marriage, labor rights and other liberal causes.
Even as he briefly pledged in the closing days of his campaign to work across the aisle, Trump has also vowed to punish his political opponents — and many blue-state leaders are at the top of his list of adversaries. On Friday, the president-elect tore into Newsom for calling a special legislative session.
“Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California,” Trump said Friday in a post on Truth Social, using his derisive nickname for the governor. “He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again.’”
And so Democratic governors and attorneys general who have spent months strategizing on how to protect their states’ progressive policies from a possible second Trump term are kicking those efforts into higher gear.
Some governors are discussing how to ensure that federal funding for state projects makes it to their coffers before Trump takes power, potentially with total Republican control of Congress, said one person who works in a Democratic governor’s office, granted anonymity to disclose private conversations. The discussions convey the concerns among some Democrats that Republicans could pause disbursements from, or even repeal, President Joe Biden’s signature programs, such as the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction acts.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also said Thursday that he has spoken with other Democratic governors since the election about how to best Trump-proof their states.
“There are many people whose lives and livelihoods are at risk, and there are many people who cried at the [election] result because they know what impact it may have on their families,” Pritzker said at a press conference Thursday.
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack,” Newsom declared in a statement. “And we won’t sit idle.”
In New York, Hochul and James created the Empire State Freedom Initiative, a program that is meant to address “policy and regulatory threats” from the incoming Trump administration, including against reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as gun safety and environmental justice. The New York governor also signaled she will propose legislation as well as take executive action in response to Trump’s victory, but did not provide specifics.
“New York will remain a bastion for freedom and rule of law,” Hochul said. “I'll do everything in my power to ensure that New York remains a bastion from efforts where those rights are being denied in other states.”
James could have an outsize impact on how Trump’s policies trickle down to New York. The Democrat, who was first elected in 2018, sued Trump’s real estate business for fraud. She won a $450 million judgment, which is being appealed.
Meanwhile, state prosecutors who often served as the first line of defense against Trump’s most controversial executive orders in his last term — banding together to try to block his travel restrictions from some Muslim-majority countries, challenge his plans to roll back vehicle emissions standards, and more — have long been preparing to again serve as a legal bulwark.
In California, state lawyers have meticulously prepared for Trump’s return — down to crafting draft briefings, weighing specific legal arguments and debating favorable litigation venues, Bonta, the attorney general, told POLITICO.
“If he comes into office and he follows the law and he doesn't violate the constitution and he doesn't violate other important laws, like the Administrative Procedure Act he violated all the time last time, then there's nothing for us to do,” Bonta said. “But if he violates the law, as he has said he would, as Project 2025 says he will, then we are ready. … We have gone down to the detail of: What court do we file in?”
In New Jersey, state Attorney General Matt Platkin cited mass deportations, an “aggressive reading of the Comstock Act” to potentially impose an abortion ban and "gutting clean water protection" as potential sources of litigation.
“If you look at the things that have been said by the president and his associates during the campaign, … if you read Project 2025, there are proposals that are clearly unlawful and that would undermine the rights of our residents,” Platkin said in an interview.
And in Massachusetts, first-term Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office has been preparing to act against threats to reproductive, LGBTQ+ and immigrants' rights and student loan-forgiveness programs, among other areas.
In response to a request for comment, Trump’s team said in a statement: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”
Democrats’ rush to reform their resistance to Trump is partly self-serving. Governors and state prosecutors who took on Trump during his first term burnished their national profiles in the process.
In some cases they were able to parlay their opposition into higher office: Massachusetts’ Maura Healey leveraged her lawsuits against Trump as attorney general to help win the governorship in 2022; California’s Xavier Becerra, the former state attorney general, is now the Biden administration’s Health and Human Services secretary and is eyeing a run for governor. And for Democrats who’ve been chafing for a chance to get off the party’s deep bench, a second Trump term presents a fresh opportunity for a potentially star-making turn ahead of an open 2028 presidential primary.
That jockeying has in some ways already begun. Several blue-state leaders held press conferences on Wednesday and Thursday to reassure anxious constituents that doubled as ways to establish themselves as leaders in the anti-Trump fight. On Wednesday, Healey was on MSNBC vowing that state police would not be involved in carrying out the mass deportations Trump has promised, seizing a national platform in a way she rarely has since challenging Trump in the courtroom as attorney general.
But there was some acknowledgment among top city and state Democrats that they would have to find ways to work with Trump, too — mainly on infrastructure projects which are often reliant on massive amounts of federal funding.
“If it's contrary to our values, we will fight to the death,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said during a Wednesday press conference about the election results. “If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams similarly pledged to find ways to partner with the incoming administration, naming infrastructure as a target area for future collaboration.
“I communicated with the president yesterday to state that there are many issues here in the city that we want to work together with the administration to address,” Adams said during a news conference Thursday. “The city must move forward.”
Holly Otterbein, Melanie Mason, Nick Reisman, Daniel Han, Maya Kaufman, Shia Kapos and Kelly Garrity contributed to this report.
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN – Donald Trump closed a years-long presidential campaign early Tuesday following a historic cycle that included two apparent attempts on his life, a pivot to a new Democratic candidate and multiple criminal indictments — with one last rally where he pushed for immediate election results.
“We want the answer tonight,” Trump said from a podium in the battleground state after calling into question the integrity of voting machines and decrying the possibility that results could take up to two weeks.
Before launching into a nearly two-hour speech that stretched past 2:00 a.m., Trump seemed wistful as he strolled down the catwalk to applause from supporters.
His voice was raspy after back-to-back rallies in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and finally Michigan.
“This has been an incredible journey. It's very sad in a way. This is the last one,” Trump said as he stood before the crowd. He recalled being in Grand Rapids in 2016, when there were doubts about his election odds.
The reminiscing didn’t last long before Trump launched a meandering closing speech where he promised to “make Detroit greater than it ever was," shared a story about billionaire supporter Elon Musk, described the Lincoln Bedroom, railed against Nancy Pelosi saying he wanted to call her the "B-word," talked about migrant gangs, threatened to tariff Mexico 100 percent over immigration and compared his crowd sizes to that of Kamala Harris.
"They have no enthusiasm. She had a rally today. She couldn’t have had more than a hundred people there. I had all four stadiums full," Trump said.
Trump, who is known to be superstitious, decided to hold his last rally in the same city in Michigan where he wrapped up his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. The former president was almost two hours late to his Grand Rapids event and kept speaking until the early morning hours. As it continued, people in the audience, some of whom had lined up since early in the morning for a seat inside the arena, began to trickle out.
Trump called on his supporters to get out and vote, and declared “if we win Michigan, we win the whole thing.”
On Trump’s last day of campaigning, the former president also spoke about his third run for the White House as more of an end of an era that began in 2015 – and could finally dawn if he doesn't win the presidency a second time.
“It’s now been nine years we have been fighting, step by step together,” Trump said. “There is love in this room, I think there is love in this country, I think it is a much bigger movement than we understand.”
“There will never be anything like this,” Trump said. At the end of the rally, he invited his adult children to join him on stage.
Trump has appeared to grow sentimental as he discusses the political movement he has led — one characterized by his signature rallies where supporters turn up by the thousands, standing in line for hours. Over the last week, Trump reminisced about his nearly decade-long run of holding political gatherings, repeatedly making comments about concluding his campaigning for office.
“This is really the end of a journey,” Trump said Monday, “but a new one will be starting.”
Trump has made it clear he wants to be remembered as the only political figure who could command such a following, even when, he notes, he is eventually succeeded by another Republican.
“We’re doing something historic. This has never been done before,” Trump said in Raleigh, during the first of four such stops Monday. “They’ll never have rallies like this.”
Kellyanne Conway, who ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, described his rallies as “central” to his campaign. “People feel like they are part of something enjoyable and consequential, not a conventional campaign, but.a movement. We are entering the 10th year - and final homestretch - of the Trump rallies. Millions of people have shown up to watch him stand up, put up and speak up. The people are his oxygen.”
Colleen Kill, 31, from Rochester Hills, Michigan, was waiting in line to find a seat inside the arena on Monday night and said coming to a Trump rally was on her “bucket list.” Kristi Wackerle, 44, from Grand Rapids, said she wanted to “be part of history.”
“This could be the last time,” she said.
Trump boasted about his crowd sizes even as the numbers at some recent events fell. On Monday, Trump claimed he could have filled Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum “three times, maybe four times” on Friday night. (He filled much of the 18,000 capacity arena, but there were still open seats inside.)
He made that claim Monday as he stood in a not-full Dorton Arena in Raleigh, where photos show eight years ago, nearly every seat was occupied during his Election Eve rally.
Later, in Pittsburgh, Trump mocked Harris for holding a competing rally in the city, calling it “little” and “quite embarrassing.” He marveled at the “frisky” crowd he had drawn to the PPG Paints Arena, which was on its feet cheering and jeering through at least the first hour of his speech. Left unmentioned: the draped-off upper level and the empty seats that dotted the lower bowl.
The Harris campaign turned Trump’s obsession into a frequent campaign trail taunt.
Over the past week, as Trump confronts the possible end of his political career, his demeanor has oscillated wildly — sometimes within the same day. At times in this final stretch, he has displayed the cutting humor that endeared him to millions of Americans first as an entertainer and then as a politician. On Wednesday speaking to press from a sanitation truck and wearing a bright-orange safety vest at a Green Bay, Wisconsin rally, Trump mocked President Joe Biden over his muddled “garbage” remark.
But on Sunday, after a series of polls showed positive signs for Harris, Trump was at his most aggrieved. While criticizing Democrats’ handling of the southern border, Trump said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 after failing to overturn the results of the 2020 election. While speaking about the enhanced security protections at his rallies following two attempted assassinations, he said he wouldn’t “mind” if “somebody would have to shoot through the fake news” to get to him. His campaign later said Trump was not wishing harm on the media.
By the time he rallied in North Carolina hours later, Trump — who has kept up an aggressive schedule of three or four rallies a day down the campaign’s home stretch while sometimes bemoaning the pace — seemed confused about what state he was in.
On Monday, Trump was more nostalgic as he stared down an uncertain future.
“It’s sad,” he said in Pittsburgh. “We’ll never have this. But we’ll have other get togethers.”
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