President Trump teased the possibility of bringing rallies back to indoor arenas with less than two months until Election Day.
The president, who has not held an indoor rally in a major arena since one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, told the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito after his Thursday evening rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, that the campaign “may do the arenas” before the Nov. 3 contest against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The president lamented that he’s unable to “do the arenas” and talked about the pros and cons of doing outside events, such as Thursday’s rally that took place in Hangar 1 at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport. Trump’s large indoor rallies, which were a hallmark of the 2016 campaign and in the 2020 campaign until the coronavirus pandemic, are widely considered to be a strength for the president, generating excitement among his most ardent supporters.
[Read: Salena Zito interview with President Trump]
“It’s so disappointing,” Trump said of Thursday’s rally. “I don’t know why. You could’ve moved us back further or something, but we had the same thing in New Hampshire. We had thousands of people here, but we had thousands of people along the runway that couldn’t get in. It’s ridiculous. It’s one of those things. What am I going to do? It’s too bad, because yeah, I hate to see that. They come and they wait, but I hope you saw what was back there.”
The president, who has held smaller indoor events in recent weeks, also pointed out that hosting campaign events that are outside, which is one way the campaign is hoping to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus among attendees, is “much better” from the “standpoint of COVID or the China virus.”
Trump’s last indoor campaign event did not take place as the campaign envisioned.
First, the event was pushed back a day after it had initially been planned for Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day or Black Independence Day, and then, the turnout was lower than expected. The stadium was less than half full, but the campaign blamed the smaller than usual crowd size on supposed protesters outside the arena. Afterward, a Tulsa health official said the event “likely contributed” to a surge in COVID-19 cases.
During his interview with Zito, Trump also repeated his concern that the country “may never have an answer to the election” because of mail-in ballots and the potential for fraud.
