WASHINGTON – With enthusiastic crowds, inflated and false claims, and incendiary partisan rhetoric, President Trump has resumed the mode of politics he loves most: entertaining his supporters at rallies.
Standing in a sunset glow Tuesday night in an airport hangar in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Trump looked and looked like the political nominee he was at the time before the coronavirus. Unexplained song, back.
And so it was, as he resurrected old obsessions, such as the “perfect call” to Ukraine that eventually brought him to his political trial, and a riff about how his coveted border wall would save undocumented immigrants out of the country: an enduring device, simply like the wheel.
It is his last impediment to an excursion that until now included airfield appearances in battlefield states such as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arizona and New Hampshire. The crusade did not announce the resumption of rallies. He just started programming them.
But Trump’s preference for in-person festive apparitions now opposes the factor he least likes: restrictions on the coronavirus pandemic. In Nevada, where the president had held rallies in Reno and Las Vegas this weekend, the two occasions sank wednesday.
The Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority informed tenants who hired the hangar that trump’s saturday occasion violated state policy that restricts concentrations to 50 people.
“This has nothing to do with politics,” said Daren Griffin, president and executive leader of the airport authority. “We would keep our tenants at the same point, whether it’s a Democratic or Republican rally or any other kind of meeting.
Campaign said the Las Vegas event had also been cancelled.
For months, Trump has been pushing for his distinctive demonstrations to return to the air court, and officials have assumed they will delay those occasions in recent months before Election Day, although the number of virus cases remains consistently high. much of the country.
“People are in a position,” said Tim Murtaugh, communications director of the Trump campaign. “People are in a position to return to a more general life. “
Tuesday night, for example, Trump supporters piled up to hear the president speak, many of them opted not to wear a mask or practice social est estating by chanting “We!We love you!” They had registered online for tickets, as they used to, and were given an on-site mask, temperature controls and hand sanitist, which they were encouraged to use.
The crusade called it a “Great American Comeback” event. Despite North Carolina’s restrictions on the outdoor meetings of 50 other people, thousands of others converged under the banner through political discourse, and public fitness officials did not notice to prevent them.
Campaign aides distributed symptoms that said “This is a peaceful protest,” a troll reference to what was a loose pass given to Black Lives Matter protesters who piled up in cities across the country during the summer after the murder of George Floyd.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany advocated for the president to hold demonstrations.
“People are entitled to the First Amendment if they express their political opinion in the form of a nonviolent demonstration,” he said at a news convention on Wednesday. “If they are allowed to walk together, they are also allowed to attend a political rally. “
The airport crowds are smaller than the occasions when the president used to make headlines, but officials said hangar configuration required less preparation time and was less expensive to organize.
“It’s just that the sands, I have to say, ” said Trump Tuesday night.
“I get off the plane, make a speech, get out of here,” he told his followers the week in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
A spokesman for Trump’s Democratic rival Joseph R. Biden Jr. , said the return of the rallies was consistent with the president’s remedy against the coronavirus since March.
“This president’s contempt for experts and what is planned for science has led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Americans in Covid-19,” T. J. Said Ducklo, a biden spokesman, Joe Biden will always prioritize the fitness and protection of the American people, and we have countless examples of why the same cannot be said of Donald Trump. “
Other Biden officials said they think the plan to do rallies in the end would be counterproductive because “real voters,” adding senior citizens, would be frightened through photographs of crowds without mask or social esttachment.
Still, Trump crusade officials said they liked the contrast that rallies had created between his crusade and Trump’s Biden crusade. The events showed Trump surrounded by supporters in a way that underscored how much Mr. Trump Trump’s events, Biden, were small and distant, officials said, while sending a message that america is open backwards, which the president has tried unsuccessfully to do since March, when he declared that the country would reopen before Easter.
Trump’s advisers mentioned additional merit when the election rally returned: helping to “interview candidates” by giving the president a vehicle to vent.
But fighting with Democratic officials for their right to organize events in the top position can also help them, the advisers said, fueling complaints from the president’s supporters.
The co-chairman of The Trump Crusade in Nevada, Adam Laxalt, blamed the political retaliation of the state’s Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, even though Sisolak said his workplace was not involved in making plans or canceling occasions in the Trump Crusade.
“This is unprecedented: canceling the crusade to prevent a president from coming out within 60 days of a contested primary election in a transitional state,” Mr. Laxalt tweeted.
In a statement, Murtaugh said that “Democrats seek to prevent President Trump from talking to voters” and said the president will continue to travel to Nevada on scheduled dates. He didn’t say what Trump would do in the rallies position.
Other states with restrictions on meetings, such as North Carolina, have allowed Trump demonstrations to continue despite violations because they feel they cannot restrict their right to freedom of political expression.
In Michigan, where the president is scheduled to rally a hangar in Freeland on Thursday night, outdoor occasions are limited to another hundred people and participants must wear a six-foot mask and social distance. they were preparing for up to 5,000 more people to attend the president’s rally in a county that has recorded 2,520 cases of coronavirus and 129 deaths.
“With so little knowledge – we were informed on Saturday morning of your arrival and met with the Secret Service this weekend – it’s definitely a challenge,” said James Canders, director of MBS International Airport.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, told CNN that the occasion was “very painful,” but that her workplace was not intended to provoke him.
“The governor does not make individual execution decisions,” said Tiffany Brown, Ms Whitmer’s spokeswoman.
Kathleen Gray has contributed to West Bloomfield, Michigan and Sydney Ember of Connecticut.
Trump resumes the rallies he appreciates, Covid contradicts his Wire Services/New York Times plans.