More than 1,300 days before the next election, President Donald Trump was set to hold a campaign rally Saturday in the Sunshine State.
He was scheduled to deliver remarks in a hangar in Melbourne, Florida, at 5 p.m. EST. Despite taking office just about one month ago, Trump has already begun to focus on re-election. He filed his re-election paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Inauguration Day — something former President Barack Obama didn’t do until 2011 in his first term, PBS Newshour reported.
Trump, who regularly boasted about his campaign rally crowd sizes and squabbled with press over inauguration attendance figures, had begun boasting about the size of the crowd in Melbourne before the event took place.
“I hear the tickets — you can’t get them,” Trump said this week in a meeting with lawmakers, according to PBS. “That’s OK, that’s better than you have too many.”
An analysis in the Washington Post pointed out that Trump’s rally may be aimed at drumming up enthusiasm to counteract a rocky start to the former businessman’s presidency. Little has gone smoothly thus far. A rollout of an executive order temporarily banning entry into the U.S. for people from seven Muslim-majority countries was accompanied by legal wrangling and mass protests. Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigned after it was revealed through leaks to the press that he lied about a conversation with a Russian ambassador. Meanwhile, Democrats and some Republicans have called for an investigation into the Trump administration’s ties to the Kremlin after new reports this week alleged the campaign was in regular contact with Russian officials.
The detour to Florida is not an uncommon move for the president, who has made it a habit to spend his weekends at his resort in the state, Mar-A-Lago. In the lead-up to another Florida trip, Trump had a busy few days.
He held his first solo news conference as president Thursday and spent much of his 77 minutes at the lectern berating the press. He also commented on how he’s not an anti-Semite, how a nuclear holocaust would be “like no other” and how drugs “cheaper than candy bars” were infesting the U.S.
To watch Trump’s rally Saturday, check out the White House live video site or its YouTube page.
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