USA TODAY International Edition
After Tulsa, Trump looks for a battleground boost
Rallies this week are high stakes in key states
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump surveyed a section of new border wall in Arizona on Tuesday, the first stop on a swing through two battleground states this week as his reelection campaign tries to regain its footing after a disappointing rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In 102- degree temperatures and dusty brown terrain, Trump examined the tall metal fence along the U. S.Mexico border in San Luis, Arizona, and signed a metal plaque attached to the structure marking 200 miles of construction.
Trump, who made building the border wall a signature promise of his election campaign four years ago, declared before the tour that the barrier is “the most powerful and comprehensive border wall structure anywhere in the world.”
“Maybe somebody can get an extraordinarily long ladder, but once you get up there, it gets very high,” he said during a roundtable discussion on border security. “And it’s just about unclimbable.”
Neither the trip to Arizona nor Trump’s visit to Wisconsin on Thursday is considered an official campaign event, but both states are expected to be pivotal in this fall’s election. In Wisconsin, Trump will tour a Marinette shipyard that was recently awarded a $ 5.5 billion contract to build guided missile frigates for the Navy.
The events give Trump an opportunity to try to erase the images of Saturday’s rally in Tulsa, where he ad
dressed a crowd that filled roughly half of the arena and scrapped plans to address an overflow crowd after it didn’t materialize.
The rally came at the end of an exhaustive week for the president, which included two Supreme Court rulings against the Trump administration on LGBT workplace discrimination, as well as the administration’s effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that offers legal protection for young migrants at risk of deportation.
The administration was also forced to mount a defense after copies of former White House national security adviser John Bolton’s book circulated in Washington. The White House tried to block the book’s release but a judge cleared the way for its publication. On top of that, several polls released last week showed Trump trailing his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.
The fallout from the Tulsa rally raises the stakes even higher for the events in Arizona and Wisconsin, said Kevin Madden, a political consultant who has advised several Republican presidential candidates.
“He’s an incumbent president who is in the unfortunate position of being an underdog at the moment so, yes, the stakes are high,” Madden said. “Arizona and Wisconsin are battlegrounds that he can’t afford to lose, and his Republican allies are anxious to see the campaign turn things around because their political fortunes are at stake as well.”
In Arizona, dozens of supporters and a few protesters braved the intense heat to greet Trump.
Yolanda Juarez Ashburn, 60, from Yuma, chanted “four more years” and held a sign that said “Trump Pence Make America Great Again.”
She wants Trump to be reelected because he did what he promised, like constructing part of the border wall and helping people get jobs. She said Trump is helping citizens and legal immigrants. She’s a U. S. citizen from Mexico who has lived in the U. S. for nearly 40 years.
“I live very close to the border and I see how many people pour across the border,” she said.
Margarita Keath, 76, showed up to protest against Trump. Keath, who is from Puerto Rico, carried a sign that read, “Liar, corrupt, Trump has to go.”
“We cannot take four more years of this guy,” she said. “Everybody needs to get out and vote. He is not the president for all of us. He is only president for his base.”
What happened in Tulsa
With less than five months until Election Day, and political events largely on hiatus for several months because of coronavirus, Trump on Saturday aimed to restart his campaign before an arena packed with 19,000 supporters in Tulsa.
Instead he was greeted with a crowd of about 6,200, according to an estimate by the Tulsa Fire Department, and a sea of empty blue seats in the upper sections of the arena. Plans for for the president and vice president to speak to an overflow crowd outside the arena were canceled after the dwindling crowd moved inside.
Alex Conant, a GOP consultant who served as communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential effort in 2016, said the campaign will likely need another form of relaunch after Tulsa’s less- than- expected attendance.
“Trump needs to reframe this election as a choice between himself and Biden. The last couple of weeks were among the worst stretches for any president ever,” Conant said. “He needs to turn the page, reframe the race and not have any more missteps like Tulsa.”
The campaign blamed low turnout Saturday on media coverage of nationwide unrest following the death of George Floyd last month and a surge in coronavirus cases in Oklahoma in the days leading up to the rally.
The president has dismissed concerns from health experts about the spread of COVID- 19 at large- scale events such as his rallies and protests. But before Saturday’s rally, the campaign announced six members of its advance team, including two Secret Service members, had tested positive. On Monday, two more staffers joined their ranks.
Matt Mackowiak, a Texas- based Republican political strategist, said the events in Arizona and Wisconsin give Trump an opportunity “to drive a message and motivate his base after three months where we seen some slippage in the polling.”
“He can call attention to promises kept on his key issues, which will remind voters of the stakes in the election and the choice they have” in November, Mackowiak said.
Most polls show Trump trailing Biden. Biden leads Trump by 9.5 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics most recent average of polls. Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in Arizona by 3.5 percentage points in 2016 and pulled off a surprise victory in Wisconsin by edging Clinton by less than 1 point. Democrats and Republicans are both eyeing the states in their path to victory in November.
Before Tuesday’s trip highlighting border security, the administration announced Trump would sign an executive order suspending temporary visas for foreign workers until the end of 2020.
Trump’s strategy appears to be taking a page from his 2016 playbook, Conant said, which is to ensure his base is more energized than the Democratic base by focusing on the revival of his raucous rallies and issues that propelled him to the presidency like immigration.
But some of those issues that dominated in 2016 may feel a little out of place as the country wrestles with the twin crises of economic fallout over the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests over police brutality and racial inequity, according to Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“Immigration may have felt more important in 2016 when there was less going on, but with the public health crisis, economic troubles, real concern about inequities in policing – does the president’s focus on the same issues he focused on in 2016 have as much relevance in a different time?” Kondik said.