Trump fires up enthusiastic crowd at campaign stop at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport near Latrobe - TribLIVE

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President Trump glided into a Trump Country crowd in Westmoreland County on Thursday evening to rave reviews.

The crowd of several thousand at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport near Latrobe erupted into screams of U-S-A!, U-S-A!, U-S-A! as Trump exited Air Force One into the twilight evening, vowing that “61 days from now, we’re going to win the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

In a wide-ranging speech that went on nearly two hours, with an enthusiastic crowd frequently cheering, he revisited his stands on trade, immigration, opposition to mail-in voting and support for law enforcement.

Trump repeatedly returned to a focus on jobs, charging that a Joe Biden presidency would be a disaster for Pennsylvania workers.

“Joe Biden wants to surrender your jobs to China,” he said. “ … I will keep your jobs in America.”

Casting himself as the law-and-order candidate, he vowed to “bring rioters, looters and anarchists to justice. That’s what we do. We have 400 under arrest now. That’s what we do.”

“We love our law enforcement,” he said, as the crowd went wild.

“The rioters want Biden to win,” he said.

As for the violence that has roiled American cities, Trump said he could end it “in a half an hour.”

Trump vowed the coming year will be the best year ever and attributed all the nation’s economic ills to “the China virus.”

“If we didn’t get hit by the plague from China, I would have canceled most of the rallies. We wouldn’t need a rally,” he said, adding that a vaccine is “just around the bend.”

“Anyone else was president and it would be two or three years from now. … Three vaccines are in final stages of clinical trials,” he boasted.

“A big percentage of the people who died in this country died because New York was incompetently run by Gov. Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio,” Trump said.

As he has in the past, Trump attacked Biden on energy. Referring to his opponent as “Hidin’ Biden,” he said the former vice president would abandon fossil fuels and end fracking, positions Biden has refuted.

Biden, he insisted, is backing off positions he once held because they’re not being well received.

“The so-called Paris Climate Accord, it is a disaster, a death sentence for your energy jobs. I got you out of that. Biden vowed to reinstate it,” Trump said.

“No oil, no guns, no God,” Trump told the cheering crowd, claiming Biden would obliterate the Second Amendment.

“They’re going to raise your taxes. They’re going to take away your guns,” he said, raising boos from the crowd.

At least one labor union was out in force to support Trump. Members of Boilermakers Local 154, a group that represents 1,500 members who service power plants, steel mills and variety of heavy industrial installations, were on hand and decked out in their gray and teal T-shirts to officially offer their endorsements.

“They’re very special people. They work hard they do great work,” Trump said, gesturing to the union group on a riser to his left.

Battle for Pennsylvania

The event underscored just how much Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are staking on Keystone State voters, said Alison Dagnes, an author and political science professor at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania, which Biden consistently reminds audiences is his home state, gave Trump a razor-thin, 44,000-vote victory — out of more than 7 million votes cast — in 2016. The state again is seen as a crucial prize in this year’s presidential election.

Trump’s Westmoreland campaign event came three days after Biden made his first major post-convention campaign stop in Pittsburgh. There, at a repurposed steel mill on the banks of the Monongahela River, he challenged Trump’s performance in fighting the coronavirus and quelling the racial unrest that has roiled the nation for months.

Two weeks earlier, as Biden accepted the Democratic nomination, Trump campaigned in Old Forge, a small town outside Biden’s childhood home of Scranton.

Both candidates intend to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial in Somerset County next week to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, their campaigns said.

Vice President Mike Pence last month visited Greensburg, where he spoke for about 30 minutes at a “Cops for Trump” event before an estimated 400 people downtown next to the city police station. On Tuesday, Pence went to Wilkes-Barre for a “Workers for Trump” rally.

“It’s our moment in the sun. We are the swingiest of swing states,” Dagnes said. “If you look at the polls in the last two days, most of the distance between Biden and Trump in the battleground state polls has been consistent. The one that has tightened up has been Pennsylvania.

“It is very, very clear that Pennsylvania with 20 electoral votes is crucial to Trump’s victory.”

Although the president lost Allegheny County and Philadelphia in 2016, large margins in the state’s rural and suburban counties pushed him over the top.

In visiting the Latrobe area, rather than Pittsburgh, Trump chose a region with far fewer voters — but one where his base is strong.

Westmoreland, the largest outlying county in the metropolitan Pittsburgh area, is a case in point. Trump bested Hillary Clinton in the county by the 2-to-1 margin in 2016.

Five minutes outside of Latrobe, in a village at the foot of the Laurel Highlands, local Trump activist Leslie Baum Rossi ushers thousands of visitors through the so-called Trump House — an old two-story, frame structure painted red, white and blue with a 14-foot-tall Trump cut-out on the lawn. It has become a shrine for Trump supporters who flock there to snare his signature Make America Great Again gear and take selfies with Trump’s towering likeness.

The region fits well into Trump’s 2020 strategy, Dagnes said.

“It has been his plan, I think, to repeat the magic of 2016. That means really just riling up the base, getting his base to the polls on Election Day and ensuring that he can thread the needle like he did in 2016 again,” she said. “If that’s the plan, you go to the place you won the last time. You are saying, ‘You showed up for me, and now I’m showing up for you.’”

Deb Erdley is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Deb at 724-850-1209, derdley@triblive.com or via Twitter .