Suburban Trump supporters pack Oaks expo center: ‘There’s a lot of closet Trumpers’

Michelle Civitello’s Audubon neighborhood doesn’t have many Trump signs but the retired pharmaceutical worker wasn’t surprised to walk into the nearby Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and find the only available spot to stand along the back wall.

“There’s a lot of closet Trumpers out there,” Civitello, 70, said from the packed expo hall.

Former President Donald Trump made his first public campaign stop in the Philadelphia suburbs Monday night to Oaks, an exurb of Montgomery County.

The increasingly Democratic suburbs helped deliver the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, but Monday’s crowd drew MAGA-merch wearing supporters from across the populous five-county region.

Whether Trump can improve his numbers in the Philadelphia’s collar counties could be the difference-maker in Pennsylvania where the presidential election margins remain razor thin.

Trump answered a few friendly questions from supporters in the audience in a conversation moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — including a father who was struggling to afford a house, a small business owner concerned about inflation, and a Gold Star family desperate to find out what led to their son’s death.

He promised to cut inflation and housing interest rates — without specifics on how. And he embraced Charles and Mary Ann Strange, whose son Michael was killed alongside 29 other U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2011.

“We’re the party of common sense,” he said. “We want rules. We want good education. We want low interest rates. We want jobs. And you know what? We want a strong military.”

Ahead of the event, several Trump supporters said they hoped Trump would focus on the economy to appeal to center-right voters in the suburbs and to strike a less negative tone.

“I do really want to hear an optimistic view,” Rita Schmidt, 70, of Warminster, who already voted for Trump by mail said ahead of the rally. “We know what the gloom and doom is.”

But Trump didn’t exactly temper his message in the moderate suburbs. He talked about illegal immigrants invading the country and described Aurora as a war zone taken over by Venezuelan gangs, a narrative local leaders in Colorado have rejected.

At one point he got the date of the November election wrong and urged the crowd to vote on Jan. 5.

The evening ended somewhat bizarrely, with Trump playing music for the crowd while he stood on stage after cutting the Q&A short due to the medical emergencies. The Trump campaign reported three people were taken from the venue to an area hospital but their conditions were not immediately known.

The visit to Oaks was Trump’s fourth event in Pennsylvania in less than ten days and comes in the midst of a barnstorm of the state by both campaigns. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke in Erie around the same time as Trump’s event and both vice presidential nominees, Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have events in the state on Tuesday.

The vice president in Erie continued to liken Trump to a dictator, someone who would not be afraid to use the powers of the military to persecute his enemies.

“Donald Trump is an unserious man,” Harris said as the crowd booed the Republican nominee. “But the consequence for him being president again are brutally serious.”

As Harris touted the importance of Erie, a bellwether that often predicts presidential elections, Trump tried to flaunt his own Pennsylvania ties, reminding the Montgomery County audience he went to Wharton.

“Don’t ever call [Pennsylvania] a state. It’s a commonwealth,” he said, adding later: “I know you so well. I’m here all the time. I’m here all the time.”

For all his visits, though, Trump has recently focused his travel on the kinds of predominantly white working-class places that helped get him elected in 2016. But the Philadelphia suburbs are a key part of the equation for winning the state. The suburbs are home to the largest number of voters in Pennsylvania.

Suburban voters gave Biden the most votes of any regional group in the state in 2020 and Trump pulled his second-largest vote haul out of the suburbs, after rural parts of the state.

His decision to rally in the leafy Montgomery County exurb with about three weeks until Election Day drew suburbanites in down puffer vests and synthetic golf polos to the venue known for hosting the Philadelphia gun show each year.

As college-educated voters in Philadelphia’s suburbs continue to flock to the Democratic party — a seismic political realignment inspired by both Trump and his larger MAGA movement — supporters in Oaks described a sense that their unchanged conservative beliefs had made them a minority in their affluent, bedroom communities.

Marita and Dan Finely, of Wayne, have only seen a few Trump lawn signs in their Main Line community this year; Marita, a stay-at-home mom, believes showing visible support for the former president is asking for conflict from Harris-supporting neighbors.

“We think people are for Trump — as they were for Trump against Hillary,” said Finley, speculating that support for the Republican in the suburbs was larger than it appeared. “They just don’t want to deal with the nonsense.”

One topic that did not come up on stage Monday night was abortion rights or Trump appointing justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. The issue has traditionally been a difficult one for Republicans in the suburbs.

It did come up in Chester County where Gwen Walz, the wife of Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was stumping for Harris.

“I hear Trump is also here in the Collar Counties today, peddling his same old gripes and grievances,” Gwen Walz said. “He may even try to rewrite history on his record of attacking our reproductive freedom. Well, I’m a longtime teacher. And in my classroom, we believe in facts. So here are a few: Donald Trump overturned Roe — that’s a fact.”