In Arizona, Trump has a redo of his Oklahoma rally
The president renewed his performance for a packed
crowd of students, most of whom didn’t wear protective masks.
By BRYAN
BENDER and MATTHEW CHOI
06/23/2020
07:52 PM EDT
Updated: 06/24/2020
01:35 AM EDT
PHOENIX —
After a disappointing showing at his campaign rally over the weekend, President
Donald Trump renewed his performance for a packed crowd of students on Tuesday,
telling his Arizona audience that they were guardians in a cultural war over
the heritage of the country.
“We’re here
today to declare that we will never cave to the left wing and the left-wing
intolerance,” the president said at a Students for Trump event in Phoenix.
The
appearance, at the Dream City megachurch, was one of his first rallies since
taking a three-month hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic. Images from
the event showed a large crowd tightly packed together, with almost no one
wearing protective masks. There were no temperature checks for the estimated 3,000
cheering attendees who, like many of Trump’s staunchest fans, ignored a new
local ordinance requiring them to wear a mask, despite a public-health plea
from the Democratic mayor on Monday.
The
coronavirus is out of control in the Grand Canyon State after its governor
lifted a stay-at-home order last month, and the president is polling relatively
poorly here against his presumptive Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe
Biden.
Low
attendance at Trump’s event in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday (only 6,200 of the
venue’s 19,000 seats were occupied) made headlines and overshadowed the
president’s comeback message. But on Tuesday, he recast that rally as a roiling
success, calling it the “number one show in Fox history for a Saturday night.”
Trump
started 10 minutes early — uncharacteristic for a president who routinely
begins rallies as much as an hour late. His appearance came as Fox News was
airing an interview with the president’s former national security adviser John
Bolton, whose tell-all book of his time in the White House makes damning
accusations of corruption by Trump. Trump and his administration have condemned
the book and tried to block its release.
Speaking to
the young audience, Trump tapped into campus culture wars on free speech to
draw a divide between his supporters and protesters fighting against racism and
police brutality following the death of George Floyd, an African American man,
at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Trump
declared the students in the audience as the cultural defenders of not only his
movement but also of American values as a whole, portraying Democrats as
intolerant and “totalitarian.” He applauded the student activists in the crowd
“who stand up for America and refuse to kneel to the radical left,” bashing the
mainstream media and accusing “vicious” Democrats of stifling dissent but — and
without evidence — accusing them of letting anyone vote, “even if they’re not
citizens.”
The
president condemned the removal of monuments for slave owners and Confederate
leaders as a destruction of American history. He called the audience “smarter”
than Democrats, who he said require “absolute conformity.”
“They hate
our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as
Americans,” the president said. “Our country didn’t grow great with them. It
grew great with you and your thought process and your ideology. The left-wing
mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new
oppressive regime that they alone control."
The
president celebrated the thwarting of an attempt to pull down a statue of
Andrew Jackson in front of the White House on Monday evening, repeating his frequent
new line of being a “law and order” president.
“If you
give power to people that demolish monuments and attack churches and seize city
streets and set fire to buildings, then nothing is sacred and nothing is safe,”
Trump said. “We stopped them last night.”
Protesters
have been targeting monuments dedicated to historical figures that have advanced
slavery or colonialism, asserting they are better remembered in history books
and museums than celebrated with memorials.
But Trump
characterized their attempts as effacing history, telling the crowd: “The left
are not trying to promote justice and equality. [They are in] the pursuit of
their own political power.”
The
president repeated a claim he made on Monday night that those who deface public
monuments would receive 10 years in prison, according to the Veteran Memorials
Preservation and Recognition. The act actually caps punishment for defacing
memorials for service members on public land at either 10 years in prison, a
fine or both.
A debate is
raging here among the political class over whether the scene inside the church,
which is separated from the city’s commercial districts by massive parking lot,
suburban subdivisions and a nature preserve, is merely a mirage in the
sandstorm swirling all around it.
Tuesday was
another record day for new Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations in Arizona, as
public health authorities struggle to get the virus under control and avoid
another shutdown, which would hammer an economy that has been slowly rebuilding
in recent weeks but remains fragile.
The state
reported 3,591 new cases, nearly doubling its daily case count from last week,
and 42 related deaths. And hospitalizations exceeded 2,000 for the first time
since the pandemic began.
When he
mentioned what he called “the plague,” the president dismissed it: “It’s going
away,” he said.
“What a job
we’re doing with testing. We did ventilators,” Trump said, attacking “the fake
news people” for what he called misleading the public about how bad the
situation is.
“We’re
going to have a vaccine very soon,” he promised.
Later in
the speech he made fun of the disease and its various names to rousing
applause, including referring to it with his new xenophobic moniker, “kung
flu.”
He took a
jab at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who he said had danced “in the streets of
Chinatown in San Francisco, long after I banned China from coming here,” in a
reference to his travel ban on foreigners from mainland China at the height of
the coronavirus outbreak. San Francisco’s Chinatown was founded in the 19th
century, and many of its residents have families who have lived in the United
States for several generations.
The
November presidential election is the battleground for the future of the
country, Trump said. The president charged his audience to get him reelected so
they can defeat what he portrayed as the threat to America of a Democratic
victory.
“This is
the choice of two futures,” he said. “The left’s vision of disunity and
discord, or our vision of equal opportunity and equal justice.”
The
president included unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud via mail-in voting,
claiming Democrats were trying to rig the election. Democrats have argued for
more mail-in voting to prevent large crowds in polling places during the
coronavirus pandemic.
Trump has
previously told POLITICO that mail-in ballots are “my biggest risk” to
reelection, and Republicans are fighting a legal battle to bar the expansion of
voting options amid the pandemic. Most Arizona voters vote by mail.
The
ebullient scene in the church obscures what many see as an uphill battle for
the president to hold on to a state that is seen as critical to his reelection.
“Arizona
has been one of the most rabid constituencies for Trump,” said Barrett Marson,
a political consultant who advises Republican candidates. “It may not be the
largest, but it is certainly some of his most rabid fans. But as we have seen,
it doesn't translate necessarily into support at the polls. Whether it’s more
than 50 percent is another question.”
Kirk Adams,
a former state representative and chief of staff to the state’s Republican
governor, Doug Ducey, one of Trump’s favorites, predicted that “it’s going to
be a close race. I just don’t think there was any way around that Arizona is up
for grabs.”
He pointed
out that even the president’s victory here in 2016 was much closer than other
Republican presidential candidates in recent elections.
“The
president only beat Hillary Clinton by three points,” Adams said. “When you
compare that with other statewide candidates … he clearly underperformed.”
But other
GOP players in the state contend the president still remains in a strong
position.
Rep. David
Schweikert, the three-term Republican congressman who represents nearby
Scottsdale, said he didn’t ’t think that traditional political models applied.
“It's hard
to look at the polls and make any real sense,” said Schweikert, who was
recognized by Trump in the Tuesday crowd.
He cited
some of the more modest neighborhoods in his district.
“They’re
not neighborhoods where you would expect to find many Republicans,” he said.
“Go drive through them and look at the number of Trump flags. The
constituencies for this president are different. You find Trump support in
areas where it’s not about a typical Republican-Democrat, right-left. It’s more
the populist anger.”
Officially,
the president’s campaign is also bullish.
“We have
over two million voter contacts,” said Keith Schipper, the campaign’s regional
communications director responsible for Nevada and Arizona. “Contrast that with
Joe Biden, who just hired his first two staffers last week. They are
parachuting in to try to build these relationships. Arizona voted for the
president in 2016 and it’s going to go for him again in November.”
But Adams,
the former chief of staff to Ducey, said he didn’t think Biden needed much of a
presence to compete with Trump here.
“I don’t
think it matters that the former vice president hasn’t established much of a
ground game here because, frankly, he’s not going to need it,” he said. “This
election is a referendum on Donald Trump.”
Moreover,
he said, the former vice president “will be able to borrow from the significant
ground game that the Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups have already
established in the state. And that they’d been building, really, for the last
three or four cycles.”
Marson, the
GOP political consultant, added: “People are talking about how Arizona is
purple. I totally disagree with that, but Trump is making it.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário