At latest rally, Trump's diehard supporters look forward to another rematch with Biden

Angela Wilkinson, draped in a colourful campaign banner and wearing an oversize “God, Guns, and Trump” necklace around her neck, declared at a political gathering that her hero will succeed Joe Biden in the White House next year.

Just two days after Biden announced his reelection candidature for 2024, his likely Republican opponent Donald Trump landed on early-voting New Hampshire Thursday to energise supporters and strengthen their confidence in his ability to recapture the position he lost to the senior Democrat.

Many people, like Wilkinson, a 48-year-old insurance salesman from Maine, stated at the gathering in a Manchester hotel ballroom that they were looking forward to another Biden-Trump fight.

“A rematch? There wasn’t even a match to begin with” back in 2020, an exasperated Wilkinson said, alluding to largely debunked claims of election fraud she and others repeated at the event.

“But bring it on,” Wilkinson, hand on one hip, said with a grin. “Because Biden is going to get annihilated. And for sure we’re not going to have any election meddling” in 2024.

New Hampshirite native Anne-Marie O’Neil agreed. “I don’t like Biden,” and “There should be a rematch,” said the 63-year-old licensed nursing assistant.

Asked whether she was prepared for a bruising battle which could feature Trump campaigning while under a shadow of legal woes, O’Neil didn’t flinch: “I have the stomach for anything.”

‘He’s a fighter’

Trump arrived in New Hampshire with bad news weighing on his campaign.

This week a woman writer testified in a New York court that Trumped raped her in the mid-1990s.

His vice president Mike Pence appeared Thursday before a grand jury investigating the 2001 US Capitol riot by Trump supporters.

And earlier this month Trump appeared before a judge to face indictments related to hush-money payments he made to a porn star just before the 2016 election.

Still, the MAGA base refused to be distracted by the barrage of legal challenges.

“It pushes him forward, he’s a fighter,” O’Neil said. “They’ve been after Trump since Day 1.”

And Trump reminded his audience as much, recounting a series of old grievances — the 2020 election was “rigged,” Democrats are “weaponizing” the subpoena process, and the “corrupt global establishment” is aligning to defeat him once again.

His fans cheered wildly when Trump, himself 76, mocked his 80-year-old Democratic rival, imitating a lost or stumbling elderly man and then pledging: “We’re going to crush Joe Biden.”

The brash billionaire also recounted the greatest hits of talking points in his more than 90-minute address.

He said, among other things, that he is the only candidate who “will prevent World War III,” illegal immigration has made the United States a “dumping ground for the entire world,” and that the United States is now, under the Biden administration, run by “stupid people.”

‘Like a zombie’

Despite an eye-popping $787.5 million payout by conservative-leaning Fox News to settle a lawsuit claiming the network willfully aired Trump’s false claims including accusations of election fraud, his supporters in Manchester insisted much of what was deemed conspiracy theories by critics was actually true.

“I don’t believe he lost the election at all,” said Maureen Anderson, 43, from neighbouring Massachusetts. “I think he won in a landslide, you know?”

One supporter, a Vietnamese American in his late forties who identified himself as Tin Tran, was decked out in a cowboy hat and a suit that read “ReTrumpbution Now” in gold letters down the back.

He expressed fears that Trump was facing a corrupt Democratic team that would do anything to keep the Republican leader out of the White House.

“They’re going to steal the election again!” he said with a loud flourish as Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” played on the rally’s audio system.

Biden is “like a zombie, so easy to control him behind the scenes,” Tran added.

While Mike Osene and his wife Anne, both 45 and from Connecticut, expressed less radical views about the race and conceded that Trump lost in 2020, they were both optimistic about challenging Biden again.

“If there is a rematch, I think Trump will wipe the floor with him,” Mike Osene said.

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