Opinion: What Trump really wants from his risky rallies
Trump wants to hold rallies with large crowds because the notoriously thin-skinned President seems desperate to hear the approval of his supporters. This is less about politics and more about his ego.
I know you might be asking: Aren’t his rallies scheduled this week for Florida, Pennsylvania and Iowa — the first after taking a break to recover from his contracting the coronavirus — actually about helping Trump close the 11-point lead Joe Biden has on him? In normal times, yes. But these are anything but normal times. We are in the midst of a deadly pandemic that has taken over 214,000 American lives, and Covid-19 cases are alarmingly still on the rise. Trump’s rallies — where in the past maskless supporters have crowded on top of each other — have the potential to make that worse.
The political reality is that Trump can get his message out and make headlines without holding campaign rallies, as we saw this past week when he was in the White House recuperating from his own Covid-19 infection. With various appearances on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and the videos he released via Twitter, Trump was all over the news.
In key swing states, he can reach voters simply by traveling to those states to attract local coverage without holding a campaign rally. After all, he’s the President of the United States. In fact, this might actually help his campaign if, instead of rallies that generally result in headlines about how many lies he told, he remains focused on a single message tailored for the special interests of voters of that state.
Overall, these rallies are political losers for Trump. While some Trump supporters may love them, most Americans disapprove of them in the time of Covid-19. A Fox News poll from June — shortly before Trump held his first rally during the pandemic in Tulsa, Oklahoma — found that only 23% of Americans supported such an event, with nearly 60% opposing it.
More recently, a Marquette Law School poll conducted in the all-important swing state of Wisconsin this month found that view still holds true, with only 37% of residents of the Badger State saying that campaign rallies “are safe and should continue.”
Keep in mind that these polls were taken before Trump and over a dozen people in his inner circle contracted Covid-19 after what Dr. Anthony Fauci dubbed a “superspreader event” at the White House. Adding to that, the Minnesota Department of Health on Friday identified nine coronavirus infections of people who reported attending last month’s Trump rally in Bemidji. One patient is currently in the intensive care unit.
While health officials can’t be certain that all nine were infected at the Trump rally, a spokesman for the local health department described the event as a “likely” driver of the rise in case numbers in Beltrami County, where Bemidji is located. A similar spike in infections occurred after Trump’s indoor campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June.
Apart from politics, Covid-19 cases are now rising to levels not seen since the summer’s deadly spike. When Trump held his first post-summer rally on September 8, the United States averaged approximately 36,000 new Covid-19 cases a day over a seven-day period. On Saturday, that weekly number spiked to a daily average of 48,256, with over 58,000 on Friday alone.
We don’t know if there is a strong connection between Trump’s rallies and this surge in cases, but you have to wonder if Trump supporters watching the rallies began to take fewer safeguards after seeing Trump hold these campaign events with people not wearing masks or socially distancing.
The types of large gatherings that Trump is now planning with his rallies can only make the pandemic worse, not better. They fly in the face of Dr. Fauci’s prescription in early September to “hunker down” this fall to reduce the spread of the virus. Tragically for our country, Trump apparently cares more about getting the cheers that feed his ego than with keeping Americans safe from Covid-19.
