ATLANTA (Georgia Recorder) — A rowdy rally held Saturday at an Atlanta concert hall was both a response to outrage over the Trump administration’s actions during its first two months and the unofficial early kickoff of U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s reelection bid.
Ossoff is seen as the most vulnerable incumbent Democratic senator going into the 2026 election, and the Georgia Senate race is expected to be one of the most competitive on the ballot next year. No Republican has launched a challenge yet, though that is largely because term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp has not announced his plans.
Saturday’s event – called “rally for our republic” – was a sign that Ossoff hopes to harness the kind of anti-Trump energy that made him a national figure during his unsuccessful 2017 congressional campaign and later helped send him to Washington with Sen. Raphael Warnock in 2020.
“Do you all remember how it felt to fight and to win?” Ossoff said Saturday. “But maybe right now you feel surrounded by darkness. You might be a little numb. You might be wondering if there’s a way out. But Atlanta, we don’t have the luxury of despair.”
Ossoff blasted the way the Trump administration and Elon Musk are going about shrinking the federal government, pointing to the backtracking that was done on cuts affecting Ebola prevention, a veterans’ crisis line and programs designed to protect the nation’s nuclear weapons.
“That’s not efficiency. That’s just cruelty and chaos,” he said.
And he painted Trump as out of touch with the economic concerns that largely propelled the former president back into the White House last year.
“They are literally the elites they pretend to hate,” Ossoff said. “The president is not at his palace in Florida thinking about whether you can afford daycare for your daughter or how to stop insurance companies from denying your claim, or anything that matters to our daily lives. When is the last time you even heard Donald Trump talk about health care or child care? He’s talking about invading Greenland.”
His fiery speech comes as polling shows the Democratic Party is deeply unpopular, with left-leaning voters saying they want Democrats to fight Trump’s agenda. Ossoff and Warnock both recently voted against the GOP’s stopgap spending bill, even as other Democrats – including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – backed the measure.
Ossoff’s campaign spokesperson said Saturday’s event drew more than 2,000 people to the Eastern.
Ossoff was joined on stage Saturday by Warnock, who is the only Georgia Democrat who has won statewide since 2020. Warnock won a full six-year term in 2022 when he beat football legend Herschel Walker in a runoff.
The crowd was spirited and frequently shouted out things like “What’s the plan?” Warnock was peppered with so many interjections and questions that at one point the pastor joked that the attendees had “more call and response than a Black Baptist church,” saying he might take up an offering.
“We will fight the good fight, I promise you, but I don’t want you to underestimate your own power,” he said. “Because we are a government for the people, of the people, by the people and the power is really with the people.”
“I’m trying to tell you that you have more power than you think you have,” he said. “And if you make some noise in the streets, I promise you we’ll fight for you in the suites.”
Warnock urged the crowd not to give into despair.
“When we fight, we win,” Warnock said. “And if there’s any state in the union that ought to understand that, it is the great state of Georgia. I know that the times are hard, but don’t you dare forget that in 2020, when the nation needed somebody, Georgia saved the whole country.”
Many of the people who attended said they came looking for assurances that Democrats have a plan for countering the drastic – and sudden – cuts to federal government and services as well as the erosion of democratic norms.
“I just hope that we can hear some clarity from our leaders as to the direction this party is going to take us in response to Trump and Musk because right now I’m not hearing any coherent message out of the top,” said Jim Cartmill, who lives in Woodstock.
Jan Hogan, an Atlanta resident, said she attended the rally because she saw it as a way to show her deep concern.
“I’m horrified at what is happening to our country,” Hogan said. “I feel like Trump is a Russian asset and doing Putin’s bidding. Every morning you wake up and he’s done something horrible to people who are here legally.
“I’m just going WTF is happening here? I want it to stop,” Hogan said.
Pamela Reyes of Sandy Springs and Daryl Brinkley of Roswell came to the rally hoping to hear that Democrats have a plan for slowing Trump down and preserving democracy. Reyes called the current situation a “crisis.”
“The Democrats need a plan,” Brinkley said. “We’re just spinning our wheels and he’s getting away with everything he wants to do.”
