After RNC, Trump hits road to rally his supporters in NH
WASHINGTON — Fresh off accepting the Republican Party’s nomination, President Donald Trump is looking to rally his supporters face to face as he warns about the implications of a Joe Biden victory to voters in battleground states with just over two months until Election Day.
Trump scheduled a rally in New Hampshire on Friday evening as he continues to flout coronavirus guidelines and launches an aggressive travel schedule heading into the fall campaign. In his convention finale a day earlier, Trump blasted Biden as a hapless career politician who will endanger the safety of Americans.
The 70-minute address from the South Lawn of the White House marked Trump’s attempt to frame the election as a dire choice between two futures for the nation — a theme he was expected to amplify on the campaign trail.
Trump departed the White House by motorcade Friday, requiring it to weave through District of Columbia streets packed with demonstrators participating in a commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom. The motorcade made it to Joint Base Andrews without incident. Isolated groups of protesters on street corners made their presence felt through gestures directed at the motorcade.
While the coronavirus kills 1,000 Americans each day and with the total dead at more than 181,000, Trump defied his own administration’s pandemic guidelines on Thursday to speak for more than an hour to a tightly packed, largely maskless crowd. In New Hampshire, a campaign advisory said masks for attendees are “required” in accordance with Republican Gov. Chris Sununu’s executive orders, and would be provided.
Similar indoor-outdoor rallies at aircraft hangars in recent weeks have seen limited compliance with face covering mandates. The event format has become the Trump campaign’s go-to amid the pandemic.
Trump’s pace of travel is expected to pick up to a near-daily pace. Biden, who has largely weathered the pandemic from his Delaware home, announced Thursday that he will soon resume limited campaign travel.
Trump last attempted to visit New Hampshire six weeks ago, when he called off a trip on the eve of a scheduled campaign rally citing the threat from a tropical storm — but also as his campaign worried that attendance would be sparse amid a nationwide surge in virus cases. That rally was to have been Trump’s first since his embarrassing return to the campaign trail in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, where he spoke to a halfempty arena and an anticipated overflow crowd never materialized.
Meanwhile, the Nielsen company said Friday that 23.8 million viewers watched the final hour of Thursday’s Republican convention on television, when Trump gave his acceptance speech.
A week earlier, Nielsen said 24.6 million people were watching Biden accept the Democratic nomination for president.
More people likely watched via video streams, but there was no reliable measurement of those users.
Over four nights this year, Democrats averaged 21.6 million television viewers while Republicans had 19.4 million. Democrats had more viewers on three of the four nights, with Tuesday the only exception, Nielsen said.