ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Haywood Street in downtown Asheville was jam-packed Wednesday morning with red hats, white t-shirts and an absence of blue voters.
Former President Donald Trump is making a campaign stop in his 2024 re-election bid at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 14, at the Harrah’s Cherokee Center arena.
The doors for the rally open at 1 p.m., but Trump supporters have been outside and ready since the early hours of the morning. Take Janice Curtis, Jackie Heintzelman and Karen Heavner for example.
“We left home this morning at four o’clock,” Curtis said about she and Heintzelman. “So we’ve been here since about six. Feeling good.”
Curtis felt compelled to come out to see the former president to hear his economic policies.
“I just want to hear his plans for our country and how we’re going to turn this economy around,” Curtis said. “He is a businessman, he’s proven that he’s the man for the job once before and I think the current administration has proven that they don’t know their butt from Sunday about running a country.”
Even after Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in May of this year, Curtis remained convinced that the former president belongs in office.
“The felony convictions do not bother me at all. No,” Curtis said. “I feel like this was retribution from the current administration including the Department of Justice, the president, all the way down the line. They saw that they could not beat him at the ballot box, so this was the only way they could beat him.”
“The convictions don’t bother me because they’re false accusations,” Heavner agreed. “It’s all going to be reversed, and are they gonna apologize to us when they reverse them?”
Something Heavner wants to hear Trump remark on during the rally is the way the 2020 election was decided. Though the claims that the election was stolen are false, Heavner still believes otherwise, and has concerns for the future.
“I hope he talks more about a fraudulent election. We have to have a fair election or we’re never going to get back in office,” Heavner deliberated. “If they cheat again, it’s not going to go as smoothly this time. People are not going to stand by for it like they did last time.”
When asked if she would feel that the left cheated if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are elected, Heavner explained she felt that it would be a foregone conclusion. Though there is no evidence of cheating or election fraud, Heavner remains convinced.
“Oh, we know they cheat. It’s just how big they can cheat,” Heavner exclaimed. “When Trump says we got to win ‘bigly,’ we got to win bigly to overcome the cheating on the left.”
One way the left cheats, Heavner claimed, is by counting the ballots of deceased citizens. While her claim is unverified, she shared that her husband had passed away six years ago, yet had apparently voted in the 2020 election. For which candidate, Heavner did not know.
“My mother has told me since I was a little girl that dead people vote,” she remarked. “He voted. I checked it at the polls. He voted. There’s a lot of dead people that voted.”
Elsewhere in the crowd were voters not old enough to cast a ballot in 2020. One of them, Connor McCormick, 20, was working as a Trump merchandise salesman.
Several other merch carts, loaded with hats, stickers, shirts and other bling, could be seen up and down the street, each stationed by an enthusiastic entrepreneur.
“I’m a big Trump supporter and I’m looking to make a couple bucks to put myself through college,” McCormick said. “I met a guy a couple weeks ago, and he said ‘Hey, I’ve got a whole bunch of Trump merchandise, do you wanna come sell it for me?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, why not?'”
McCormick supports Trump because of leadership qualities the young man said he admires.
“He’s a great guy. He’s an American,” McCormick said. “He loves his country, and he’s standing up for the crap that’s going on. He’s not afraid to call it out, and when he does, he might use kinda some strong words, but it needs to be said, it needs to be changed and he’s our guy.”
Trump, to McCormick, is also a protector.
“He says, like, ‘They’re coming for you, I’m just standing in the way.’ I fully agree with that. I really appreciate that and what he’s doing,” McCormick said.
Trump, he said, is defending his country from the government.
“It gets kinda specific, I can’t give you names, but they call it the Deep State. A lot of the left party, the policies they’re coming down with, they’re shutting down free speech, they’re coming down on religious Christians,” McCormick claimed. “There’s a lot of bad stuff happening in the world and Trump is standing up to it.”
Some of the strong words the former president has said in the past have been taken out of context, McCormick said. The felony convictions, for instance, are a “witch hunt,” while things that Trump has said about women are misunderstood, he said.
“Guy to guy right now, we’ve all said things that, if you put them under the spotlight, it’s like ‘Why the hell did you say that?'” McCormick explained. “I mean, if you look here down the rally, there’s like thousands of people here and like half of them are women. Realistically, it’s not that big of a deal. Everybody says things that are tough and women still support him.”
While women may support Trump, McCormick is saddened when he sees people his age that do not.
“A lot of people my age just don’t, like, understand or really take seriously the history of our world,” McCormick said. “The first thing the Nazis did were take away the guns of the German citizens. They’re taking away our guns now, so what happened then is probably gonna happen now.”
It was not the last allusion McCormick made to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. When asked about the Jan. 6 riots, for instance, McCormick said it could not have been an uprising.
“If you’re trying to overthrow the government by walking through the Capitol Building, you’re doing it wrong,” McCormick said. “You didn’t see Hitler walk through the capitol of Germany. It just doesn’t happen like that.”
When it was pointed out that Hitler was elected to office, McCormick sighed.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s tough. That’s why we gotta do our best not to elect Kamala or Biden again.”
As far as Kamala/Walz supporters went, there were virtually none in sight downtown. One jeep with “Kamala/Walz 2024” painted on the side drove by Pritchard Park and blew its horn. Otherwise, downtown was for Trump.
Even at Pack Square, a spot common to see protestors for a variety of issues, there was only a single solitary man around noon. He did not hold a sign with a campaign slogan or an anti-candidate screed.
Instead, his simple cardboard sign read “UNITED by Love we stand! Divided by Hatred we Fall!! Love is the Message! Let Peace Reign!”
Despite the excitement in downtown Asheville, things were wholly peaceful.