Donald Trump, JD Vance in Atlanta for Saturday rally

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Running for president? Then you better come to Georgia, because that’s where the action is, and so are the votes.

Donald Trump and JD Vance made their first joint appearance in the Peach State on Saturday at the Georgia State University convocation center, the same site where presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris held a rally on Tuesday night.

Several people before Trump and Vance appeared on stage, including former Georgia Sen. David Perdue, Republican nominee for Georgia’s 3rd congressional district Brian Jack , Georgia Congressman Mike Collins and Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Fresh off last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump and Vance have appeared at one rally together, in Michigan. That rally came exactly one week after Trump would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The last time Trump himself was in Atlanta was to debate President Joe Biden on CNN. Biden’s uneven, halting performance led to a series of cascading events that eventually ended his 2024 reelection bid and led to Harris becoming the presumptive Democrat White House nominee.

The Democratic National Convention is set to convene in Chicago Aug. 19-22, 2024. On Friday, Harris’s campaign said it had secured enough delegates to win the nomination; now, all eyes are focused on who she will choose as her vice presidential running mate.

Trump’s Saturday rally comes in wake of the 45th president’s controversial appearance last week at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago. Trump claimed Harris had misled voters about her race in an on-stage interview that quickly turned hostile.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Some members of Atlanta’s Black community were outraged.

“Donald Trump is really a petulant punk,” said A.M.E. Bishop Reginald Jackson. “It makes us even more determined to support (Harris) and what support (Trump) thought he might have gotten from the Black community, particularly Black men, I think he jeopardized that yesterday.”

Republicans at the state and federal levels raced to Trump’s defense.

“He’s present, he’s having a conversation, and the conversation is frankly about more than the people in that particular room,” said Josh McKoon, Georgia GOP chairman, said. “There have been too many Republicans that have said there’s no way we can get anywhere with the Black vote so we’re not even going to try. We’re not even going to engage, which is frankly insulting. I’m very grateful that we have a leader at the top of our ticket who is unafraid to go anywhere and speak to anyone.”

In 2020, Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia or any other deep Southern state since Bill Clinton in 1992.

Now, Biden is the first sitting president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 to end his reelection bid. He is also the first presidential candidate in modern political history to withdraw from the race after winning virtually all of his party’s delegates.

Trump’s selection of Vance, a one-term GOP U.S. senator from Ohio, is the first time a so-called millennial has appeared on a presidential ticket.

If Trump wins in November, he will become the second former President - the first being Grover Cleveland in the 19th century - to be elected to the White House after losing his reelection bid.

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