Where have all the rallies gone?

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.

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[S]ome congressional GOP candidates were invited to attend Trump’s rally as warm-up acts or front-row participants, providing an opportunity to appear before larger-than-normal crowds in their own backyard. One of them, congressional Republican candidate Matt Mowers, had been scheduled to speak at the rally prior to Trump’s remarks and greet him when he arrived in the Granite State.

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At this point in 2016, Trump was already holding several rallies each week, including a double-header in Nevada and Arizona on June 18 and a three-day span in late July that featured six rallies in four states over 72 hours.

By comparison, the president has only attended two large campaign gatherings — his Tulsa rally and a “Students for Trump” event in Phoenix — since his March 13 Oval Office address about the novel coronavirus.The Trump campaign had hoped to be averaging two rallies per week by June 2020, according to a person involved with the president’s reelection.

“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,” this person said, referring to Trump’s 2020 challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.

  

Lucky for you. "Sleepy Joe" is in far, far better physical shape than Old Lard Ass.

Two people close to the Trump campaign said its primary issue 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. Trump aides felt blindsided early last week when New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, publicly stated that he would not attend the [planned] Portsmouth rally out of precaution for himself and his family.

So the campaign cancelled it, blaming it on a nonexistent storm on the way.

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.

2024?

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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Last week, President Trump hosted a roundtable in Miami, Vice President Pence had a hugely successful bus tour in Pennsylvania and Women for Trump just finished up a bus tour in Wisconsin.”

The boat parade. Don't forget the boat parade.

In Florida, where Republicans are expected to hold a portion of the party’s nominating convention next month, three counties have tightened restrictions on restaurants and bars, and issued stricter guidance on mask-wearing for residents. In Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has paused further statewide reopenings and mandated masks in most public spaces. Whitmer previously said it would be “a long time” before she felt comfortable permitting Trump or Biden to host crowded campaign events in her state.

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One senior administration official said the lack of recognition some of Trump’s top aides have paid to coronavirus has done irreversible damage to his reelection campaign. Internal divisions over how much focus Trump should lend to the virus have plagued the White House in recent weeks. Chief of staff Mark Meadows and senior adviser Jared Kushner have both pushed the president to focus on communicating a strong second-term agenda, including measures he would take to help bring the U.S. economy roaring back to life, while others have encouraged him to focus on combating the virus itself given its widespread impact on most people’s lives.

And he has done neither.

Last week, he hosted a White House event to discuss the reopening of schools this fall. But he has consistently attributed the rising number of cases in southwestern states to increased testing capabilities, even as other administration officials acknowledge that testing alone cannot statistically account for surges in most areas.

In an interview with CBS on Tuesday, Trump said Covid-19 testing in the U.S. has been “working too well.”

“We’re finding thousands and thousands of cases,” he told the network.

Slow down the testing!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.