The president doesn’t want to talk about the virus. He wants big, boisterous rallies — but the virus keeps interfering.
In the days after President Donald Trump’s poorly attended rally in Tulsa, Okla., senior campaign aides repeatedly assured their optics-obsessed boss it was a one-off debacle.
They demoted a longtime staffer who had managed logistics for the failed campaign comeback. They went to work locating the perfect site for a do-over MAGA rally large enough to quell suggestions of declining enthusiasm among Trump’s base. And they quickly settled on New Hampshire, the state that jump-started Trump’s political movement four years ago and managed to dodge the brunt of Covid-19 during its rapid spread across the Northeast this spring.
Then it all fell apart with a Friday afternoon phone call from campaign manager Brad Parscale.
The abrupt cancellation of the airport-hangar event — which the Trump team blamed on an incoming tropical storm that never materialized, but three officials privately attributed to concerns about attendance — underscored the recurring challenge Trump aides face: Recreate the president’s marquee campaign rallies amid a once-in-a-century health crisis without upsetting a boss who views crowd size as a leading metric for evaluating his campaign’s success.
It also raised questions about the fate of down-ballot Republicans if the coattail effect — an incumbent president’s ability to attract votes for other candidates in his party — is no longer guaranteed.
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Campaign staffers who scrambled to get the president back in front of the large audiences he craves were so shaken by the Tulsa episode they waited until the eleventh hour to call off his New Hampshire rally for fear of upsetting him, according to the two people close to the campaign. Staffers who were already on the ground in Portsmouth, N.H., a riverfront city situated in a county Trump handily won in 2016, were caught off guard last Friday when their colleagues alerted them of the change. One campaign volunteer, who questioned the reasoning at the time, noted that intense humidity was the only weather-related issue on the ground and suggested that Parscale postponed the event until the campaign could guarantee larger crowds.
A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said the rally was expected to be rescheduled in the next one or two weeks, and disputed claims that it was postponed for any reason other than the forecast. The same spokesperson on Tuesday said there was “nothing to announce” about when the rally might be rescheduled.
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Trump aides face a recurring challenge: Recreate the president’s marquee campaign rallies amid a health crisis without upsetting a boss who views crowd size as a leading metric for evaluating success https://t.co/6CbTsmZVtB
— POLITICO (@politico) July 15, 2020
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