Trump kicks off in Kissimmee
Eric Trump, Pam Bondi and Jeanette Nuñez join stop
KISSIMMEE — On a red-hot summer day, President Trump’s reelection campaign kicked off a Florida bus tour Monday in one of the state’s bluest counties, with Eric Trump and top Sunshine State Republicans on board.
The president’s son Eric Trump, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez were outside the Osceola GOP headquarters in Kissimmee as the first stop on a trip that will take the campaign bus to The Villages, Ocala, Gainesville, Miramar and Tallahassee.
Democrats, meanwhile, derided the bus campaign as the “Magical Mystery Tour.”
The outdoor event in the 90 degree-plus heat drew a little more than 100 people to a parking lot on the south side of U.S. Highway 192, across the from the Osceola Heritage Park where Trump held one of his large indoor rallies four years ago to this week.
“I’m going to go ahead and take my mask off, and it’s going to be easier,” said Osceola GOP chair Mark Cross to cheers. The vast majority of the crowd was
not wearing face coverings, even as they moved to the front of the audience section to talk to Bondi and other VIPs.
The kickoff happened in a county that gave Hillary Clinton 61% of the vote in 2016 to Donald Trump’s 34%. Trump won Florida over Clinton by 1.2 percentage points.
But U.S. Sen. Rick Scott did well there in 2018, and Republicans have said they think they can get more votes from the Hispanic voters in the county this year.
At the kickoff Monday, Eric Trump lambasted the Democratic party as “radical and evil” and “incompetent leftist lunatics.”
“These people,” he said, “these radical leftists are truly a challenge to who we are as a society.”
He brought up Trump talking points such as “$150 billion [the Obama administration] gave Iran,” an allegation deemed false back during the 2016 campaign. He also referenced the situation in Portland, where President Trump sent in federal officers against the wishes of the city and state amid protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minneapolis.
“Now, why don’t you have any of that in Florida?” Eric Trump said. “You have Republicans and you have common sense and you have good people and you have tough cops,” he said.
He also asked supporters to vote “absentee,” which in Florida is called “mail-in” voting. President Trump has attacked voting by mail across the country but said the process was “safe and secure” in Florida because Ron DeSantis is governor despite the process being no different from dozens of states.
“In Florida, you have an honest system,” he said.
He and Bondi also asked supporters to “knock on doors,” a campaign tradition that has been scaled back due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“You know how many doors last week the Trump campaign nationally knocked on?” Bondi asked. “One million. You know how many doors the Biden campaign knocked on last week? Zero. They’re all down in their basement with Joe Biden.”
The first guest speaker was former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, whom Trump fired in 2016 but has brought back on in 2020.
“He was called a misogynist, he was called xenophobic, he was called a racist,” Lewandowski said of Trump. “Now, we call him savior. Thank you, Mr. President.”
Nuñez, once a fierce Trump opponent who called him “the biggest conman there is” in 2016, is now co-chair of the president’s Latino outreach group.
“This President has authored the greatest chapter of American prosperity in the history of our country, and I am so proud to stand by him and support him,” she said. “This president cares about the same things that we care about … our faith. How many of you out there want to make sure that you can continue to worship your creator?”
In response, Democratic U.S. Rep. Darren Soto, who represents Osceola County, called the event one of Trump’s “silly bus tours presenting alternate realities … where they pretend the coronavirus will just go away and leave voters guessing as to the president’s national testing plan.
“Meanwhile back in reality, a pandemic and recession rages on in Florida, and Trump’s selfish and incompetent leadership is fanning the flames,” Soto said in a Democratic Party of Florida statement. “In Kissimmee, thousands of Hispanic families, including my fellow Puerto Ricans, are sick, out of work, and desperate for us to come together during this crisis to help them meet the needs of their families.”
Attendees had to either take a bus from the Heritage Park to the event, for which masks were given out but many riders did not wear, or walk a mile and cross U.S. 192.
“I loved it,” said Trump supporter Jose Martinez of St. Cloud. “It was reassuring. You know, great things are coming. That’s what I’m looking for.”