Trump's Aides, Desperate to Please Him, Keep Trying to Hold Campaign Rallies
Keeping Donald Trump happy has become a nearly impossible task for staffers during a public health crisis that has made mega-rallies, one of his only joys of the job, near impossible. The anemic crowd that awaited the president in Tulsa, Oklahoma, marked a disappointing return to the campaign trail, one that reportedly inspired a full-blown Trumpian tantrum. Eager to avoid another backstage hissy fit, Trump staffers reportedly are stressed about maintaining the bread-and-circuses routine the coronavirus outbreak has decimated, scrambling to deliver on crowd size—something Trump sees as a major indicator of his campaign’s success.
Fears of another embarrassing turnout led Team Trump to abruptly call off an airport-hangar event in New Hampshire on Friday, sources told Politico, a cancellation that aides publicly blamed on weather concerns—despite the only forecast-related issue being intense humidity. Those already on the ground were reportedly “caught off guard” by the last-minute decision, just as aides were “blindsided” some days before when New Hampshire’s GOP Governor Chris Sununu announced he would not attend the rally. “I will not be in the crowd of thousands of people,” he stated. “As the governor, I try to be extra cautious for myself and the family.”
The coronavirus has upended the campaign’s plans for rallies, which at this point in 2016 were taking place multiple times a week. This time around, Trump has attended just two large campaign events since March. “President Trump was a machine in 2016 and he wants to be that same candidate this cycle. Unfortunately, coronavirus has interfered with our plans to contrast his tremendous stamina with Sleepy Joe’s,” a source involved with Trump’s reelection told Politico. One of the biggest roadblocks is finding a willing host. With Oklahoma health officials testifying that Trump’s Tulsa rally “likely contributed” to the surge in COVID-19 cases in the state three weeks later, the campaign’s primary challenge is “locating areas where local and state officials are both willing to permit large-scale campaign events and unlikely to blame the president if an outbreak of the virus occurs once he’s come and gone,” according to Politico.
Tragically, the same sort of fallout seems to be occurring in the case of the Republican National Convention, which the president was looking forward to as a celebration of his own candidacy, but which has been thrown into doubt as more and more members of the GOP say they’re not comfortable attending. “Everyone just assumes no one is going,” Illinois Representative Darin LaHood, an honorary state co-chair of the Trump campaign who RSVP’d no, told the New York Times. And yet, Trump himself continues to downplay the coronavirus—something a senior administration official predicted could cause “irreversible damage” to his reelection. On Tuesday, he again implied to CBS News that a rise in cases is the result of increased testing: “We’re finding thousands and thousands of cases” and “no other country tests like us,” he said. “In fact, I could say [testing is] working too much, it’s working too well.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/trumps-aides-desperate-to-please-him-keep-trying-to-hold-campaign-rallies
Could you imagine having to work for that douchebag?
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