Regardless of who wins Tuesday’s election, a key fixture of America’s political landscape for nearly a decade is set to disappear: the Trump rally.
The Donald Trump roadshow barreled into the end of its run Monday, with the former president set to close out his campaign with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Trump, who says 2024 will be his last campaign, has held — by his own count — more than 900 rallies since announcing his bid for the White House in 2015.
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Equal parts tent revival, carnival attraction and political stump, Trump campaign rallies have stimulated the senses of his die-hard supporters and assaulted the sensibilities of his critics — fueling much of the country’s political discourse. And they have consistently put Trump where he prefers to be — at the center of attention.
Trump supporters at a rally in State College, Pa., on Oct. 26.Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
Now, as Trump wraps up his third and final bid for the presidency, he is waxing nostalgic.
“It’s coming to an end,” Trump said in a phone interview with NBC News on Sunday. “Nine years and now, you know. … There have never been rallies like that.”
“I enjoy doing it,” the former president added. “There’s never been anything like it.”
In recent weeks, that nostalgia has manifested itself in a change in the tenor of Trump’s rallies — which have felt more retro, more 2016 campaign, more raw. At times the events have taken dark turns, such as when the former president details violent scenarios involving his perceived enemies or when a Trump supporter shouted a false, derogatory claim about Vice President Kamala Harris at one of his rallies over the weekend.
Trump also appeared to endorse violence toward journalists on Sunday, when talking about how a shooter, to get to him, would have to “shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” (His campaign spokesman insisted that Trump was actually “looking out” for the media.)
But the basics of a Trump rally have remained the same through his three campaigns.
Supporters wait for hours as music blares at torture-level decibels, interrupted only by the fawning remarks of warm-up speakers. Eventually, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” plays as a walk-up song for the former president. Trump speaks for more than an hour, rambling from topic to topic — and back again — in what he calls “the weave.”
In 2016, Trump’s rallies were an early indicator of the enthusiasm behind his candidacy that propelled him to the White House, shocking the political world and even Trump himself.
Donald Trump during a campaign event in Rothschild, Wis., in 2016.Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images file
“Someday you’ll have to write a book and say, ‘Why?’” he said Sunday in his interview with NBC News. “Because everyone asks why, and I’m not sure I can tell you why. Something just works.”
After Trump took office, rallies became one of his aides’ go-to solutions to boost his spirits. Trump even held them amid the pandemic during the 2020 race — ignoring his own government’s guidance.
Then and now, Trump routinely makes comments at his rallies that his aides would rather he not make, and that his opponents seize upon. For his millions of supporters, Trump rallies have been a gathering place for other like-minded Americans.
“I’ve been following him ever since 2015, and my first rally was in February of 2016, so I’m coming out to hear him, and it’s history, and he’s always adding new remarks, and I want to be here to hear it,” said Robin Cole, who turned out to Trump’s rally Saturday in Greensboro, North Carolina.
“I brought my brother, who hasn’t been to any of these before,” Trudy Delling, who said she has been to about 10 Trump rallies across the state. She said her brother is a veteran and “he’s handicapped, and he wanted to come to the last one in Greensboro.”
During a July rally in Pennsylvania, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, bringing the Republican Party together around the former president.
The attempt on his life has become part of Trump’s narrative at his rallies, particularly when he offers a detailed rendering of how he could’ve been spending his time.
“I didn’t need this. I didn’t need to be with you tonight,” Trump told his supporters at a rally in Virginia on Saturday. “I could have been standing at the beach, my beautiful white skin getting nice and tan. Being smacked, being smacked in the face by a wave loaded up with salt, salt water. And I could have said, ‘The hell with everything. I could have had the greatest life in the world. Instead, I got missing a little piece of my ear.’”
Trump at the RNC in Milwaukee on July 15, two days after an assassination attempt.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP – Getty Images file
But the campaigning has also served another purpose: helping Trump pay his substantial legal bills, which he has done by using political donations — which will be harder if he’s no longer running for office. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Trump could run again, even if he loses, so that he has this as an option.
The former president, his voice now somewhat hoarse before Election Day, has been holding court at his rallies longer than usual. Sometimes that’s prompted his supporters to leave early. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, some of Trump’s supporters left before the end of a speech he started 90 minutes late.
“There’s never been anything like this, not in history,” Trump told them. “And it’s a great tribute to the love that you have for this country. And I will never forget it.”
At a rally in North Carolina on Saturday night, Trump sounded wistful as he again discussed how his rallies would be winding down in a few days.
“This is coming to an end. These rallies are coming to an end. We’ve been doing it, think of it, for like nine years,” he said, calling out super fans he recognized in the audience who had “been with me through thick and thin.”
Few people have watched more Trump rallies than Acyn Torabi, a senior digital editor for the liberal website MeidasTouch News. Torabi is best known for his popular Twitter account, where his clips of Trump rallies frequently go viral. He said he’ll still have plenty to do after Tuesday.
“While I would love long walks on the beach, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon,” he said, adding, “I would actually be grateful if there was no need to do what I do. But I think whether Trump is here or not I am still going to be busy.”
Trump never likes anyone to outshine him, and he’s already warning that whoever the next Republican presidential nominee is won’t be able to hold a torch to the size of his crowds, a metric that he cares about very much.
“In four years, somebody will come down, and that person’s going to be hot as a pistol. And you know what? They’re going to draw about 300 people,” Trump said Friday during a stop in Warren, Michigan.
He similarly told NBC News on Sunday that he anticipates the next nominee “will get 400 people” at a rally.
But Trump’s own crowd sizes have waned in recent days. In Macon, Georgia, on Sunday, he didn’t fill the venue, and many people left while he was still speaking. In Greensboro, he didn’t come anywhere close to filling the arena that his team had booked.
Trump’s political career has been a family affair — his daughter and son-in-law served in the White House, and his sons and daughter-in-law have played leading roles in 2024 — and his nostalgia appears to be sinking in among them, too.
“It’s hard to believe it is coming to an end,” Eric Trump said over the weekend while thanking his father’s supporters in Pennsylvania.
“We started in 2016, and we didn’t know a damn thing about politics,” he said. “And we went out there and we fought every single day.”
A Trump campaign aide told NBC News that some of the “OGs” — the old guard, the staffers who have been with Trump since the beginning — have also been taking it in and realizing the end is coming.
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Oct. 30.Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP
“We better enjoy it because there won’t be many more,” this person said. “You think it’s never going to end, but then it does.”
A senior Trump adviser echoed the former president’s assertion that another political leader will be unable to capture the zeitgeist as he has, saying “We will never see the likes of Donald Trump again after this.”
At the North Carolina rally Saturday night, the former president again marveled at how his rallies had become an “amazing phenomenon” that he doubts will ever be repeated.
“So tomorrow I’m doing three rallies, and on Monday I’m going to do four rallies in one day,” Trump said. “And then we shut it down, never to happen again.”
The end of the Trump rally era is “sad,” he said, while promising that if elected on Tuesday, “we’re going to have a different form of rally, a rally for our country.”