Donald Trump’s pitch to his supporters is often the binary choice between wealth and ruin, between global peace and war, between happiness and terror, between Donald Trump and the Democrats.

The Republican presidential candidate offered that same message of hope-lined-fear again on Saturday, as his campaign held an event in the same space that Vice President Harris — the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency — used for a rally earlier this week.

Harris, he said, has allowed millions of migrants into the United States, destroyed her old hometown of San Francisco, the state of California and will destroy the country. She'll cause an economic crash "like in 1929," and on her watch, he worries World War III may come to pass even before the November election.

Meanwhile a vote for Trump, he said, would stop inflation, would stop illegal immigration, end wars, cause crime to plummet, make incomes soar and drive the American Dream to "come roaring back, bigger, better and stronger than ever before."

The former president also sarcastically congratulated Russian president Vladimir Putin on winning a hostage swap with the United States this week, claiming Putin got a "great deal." The Biden administration successfully negotiated the release of two U.S. citizens, including long-held prisoner former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, as well as 14 other prisoners held by Russia and Belarus. In exchange, eight Russian nationals were released back to Russia, including at least six who were suspected of working for Russian intelligence agencies.

Trump then claimed that he was able to get 58 prisoners released during his presidency without giving up anything. That is a lie. Trump’s administration negotiated releasing senior Taliban leaders, an Iranian scientist and about 250 Houthi fighters in trades for American hostages. Houthi militants have since sought to disrupt trade and travel in the Red Sea amid ongoing wars involving Israel, though it’s unclear if any of the released militants are involved in present-day fighting.

The former president also lied about no-cash bail, insisting that the policy allows violent criminals to be back on the street immediately after arrest, which he says allows them to go out and hurt more people. Generally speaking, no-cash bail allows for non-violent suspects to be cited and released or booked, released and ordered to appear in court later. Suspects arrested for serious or violent crimes are held in custody, and after arraignment, a judge decides if they will be released.

Trump repeated a tenet of the white supremacist "great replacement" conspiracy theory, insisting that Democrats want migrants to come to America to register them to vote — though it is illegal for non-citizens to vote and there is no evidence that non-citizen voting is a widespread problem. A Heritage Foundation database of election fraud cases recorded about 80 cases of ineligible voting by non-citizens out of 1,546 "proven instances of voter fraud" — about 5 percent of total cases in the database, dating back to 1982. 

Later in his speech, Trump repeatedly attacked Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, deriding Kemp for being "disloyal" and insisting that Kemp is "very bad for the GOP."

"Somewhere he went bad, and you know what? Your numbers in Georgia are very average. Your crime numbers, your economic numbers are very average, and you’ll do a lot better with a better governor," Trump told his audience.

Earlier in the day, Trump made similar attacks on both Kemp and his wife, Marty Kemp, who refuses to endorse Trump, through his Truth Social website, prompting a response from Kemp on social media.

"My focus is on winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats — not engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past. You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it," Kemp wrote.

Trump’s rally at one point became an airing of grievances.

The former president continued to hound his favorite target of the culture war, insisting that he will ensure that "men won’t compete in women’s sports." In doing so, he repeated a false assertion that a transgender woman boxer is competing in the Paris Olympics.

Trump, in talking about musicians performing at rallies, derided Bruce Springsteen, who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. "I only like people that like me," he added.

And, as he stood at a lectern bearing his name, on top of a podium at the center in an arena, surrounded by cheering supporters, during a rally being broadcast on multiple platforms, insulting local, state and federal elected officials and repeating assertions that are provably untrue, Trump insisted that "we don’t have free speech anymore in this country." He was then applauded.

Vance's "weird" attack

About an hour before Trump began, running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio dusted off an old, well-worn attack once employed by his GOP forefathers: he tried to position Kamala Harris as a coastal elite who thinks herself superior to Georgia Republicans.

"She thinks she’s smarter than you. She thinks you need to be told how to live your life. But this November, let’s tell the Washington elites, let’s tell Kamala Harris, mind your own damn business," said Vance, a Yale Law School graduate and previous critic of both poor families he grew up near in Appalachia — people he described as having a "willingness to blame everyone but yourself" — and Donald Trump himself, who he once described to NPR as someone who taps into cynicism and pessimism of frustrated, isolated Americans.

Vance also complained about the Harris campaign’s comments that he and Trump are weird, before rattling off a list of largely untrue assertions.

"Let’s talk about some things that are weird. We think it’s weird that Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries. We think it's weird for a presidential candidate to bail convicted rapists and murderers out of prison. And that's what Kamala Harris did. And I think it's especially weird when Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta, I believe came here to this, this this arena, Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta and talks with a fake southern accent even though she grew up in Canada, you can't make it up. That's pretty weird," Vance said, insisting that it’s unusal for a Black woman to speak in an accent that she has repeatedly and provably used in front of other mostly Black audiences.