Thousands cheer Trump at Florida airport rally
SANFORD, Fla. — Thousands of people cheered and chanted “We love you!” Monday night as President Donald Trump held his first campaign rally outside Washington since his coronavirus diagnosis 11 days ago.
“It’s great to be back in my home state of Florida,” Trump said.
“We’ve all endured a lot together, and we are doing better by far than in 2016,” Trump said. “We are going to have an even greater victory than we did four years ago.”
The mostly maskless crowd was seated closely together in chairs and bleachers when Trump took the podium on the tarmac at Orlando Sanford International Airport with Air Force One parked nearby. Many had waited four or more hours for the event to begin.
Trump declared the election between himself and former Vice President Joe Biden “the most important in American history.”
Trump attacked Biden for what he said would be a “draconian, scientific top-down” way of combating COVID-19.
“If you don’t feel good about” going out amid the pandemic, then “stay,’” he said. “If you want to get out there, get out there.”
Earlier, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis high-fived spectators as he arrived about an hour before the president began speaking. He wasn’t wearing a mask. The governor told the cheering crowd that Republicans “will be storming the polls to reelect Donald Trump.”
Biden criticized the event before it began.
“President Trump comes to Sanford today bringing nothing but reckless behavior, divisive rhetoric, and fear-mongering,” the former vice president said in a statement. “But, equally dangerous is what he fails to bring: no plan to get this virus that has taken the lives of over 15,000 Floridians under control, no plan to protect Floridians’ health care amid his attacks against the ACA, and certainly no plan to mitigate the economic impact the pandemic is having on families across Central Florida.”
White House physician Sean Conley on Monday night released a memo that the president had tested negative for the virus on “consecutive days” to support his diagnosis that Trump was no longer ill or contagious.
Other critics were concerned about holding a large rally when coronavirus cases are still relatively high in the state, and as previous Trump rallies have been tied to spikes in COVID-19 cases.
Hours before the rally began, Mary Hersey, 57, walked in alongside a friend while holding a pink “Women for Trump” flag. She said she was attending “just to let (Trump) know that we support him at this crucial time in our democracy.”
“I feel like there’s a lot of women out here that don’t get him,” she said. “They see him as a person that puts women down, or a racist or something like that.”