If you want to know exactly how well Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is doing as we count the last three months before Election Day, all you have to do is Google “list of rallies for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign 2016 “and compare it to what you have seen lately.
Now that it was a presidential campaign! Not dozens of demonstrations, hundreds of demonstrations! Trump held 187 protests during the Republican primaries, between June 15, 2015 and June 3, 2016. He held protests in Costa Mesa, California; Warwick, Rhode Island; Vienna, Ohio; Evansville, Indiana; Warren, Michigan; Bethpage, New York; and dozens and dozens of other cities and towns.
I remember the demonstration on Bethpage, because I went to it. It was held at Grumman Studios on April 6. I was curious to see how the gold plated man I had followed when living in New York City in the 70s and 80s was campaigning, so I went to Donald Trump’s website for President.
Here’s what I found: a short list of upcoming rallies and an online request for a ticket for each of them. There were rallies scheduled for Rochester and Albany and Pittsburgh and Hartford, so I filled out the short form for my Bethpage rally ticket and printed it out. Then I searched the rest of the Trump campaign website, you know, the white papers and the list of endorsements and positions on current issues.
There were no more pages on the Trump campaign website. You could request tickets for the upcoming rallies, and that was it.
As it happened, he had been on Hillary Clinton’s website for president recently for the same reason, looking for an event he could attend so he could see the candidate in action. On the left of the home page, there was a list of upcoming campaign events: fundraisers, rallies, city meetings, etc., spanning several weeks, as I recall. Hillary did not appear in any of them. Instead, the “substitutes” replaced her: Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, several senators, and sometimes a governor. But not Hillary. On the right side of the page were links to some 35 campaign “white papers” giving Hillary’s positions on everything from immigration to crime, health care, and gun control. But at least during the few weeks covered by the campaign’s main website at the time, Hillary Clinton was not found.
In the same weeks covered by the timeline on the Clinton for President website I watched, Trump appeared in Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, West Virginia, California, and Oregon.
Trump’s campaign after winning the Republican nomination was just as busy. It appeared in 129 demonstrations between June 10 and November 7, 2016. It was everywhere: fairgrounds, convention centers, Las Vegas casino hotels, airports, sports stadiums, concert halls, even an equestrian center in Jacksonville and a maritime center. Park amphitheater in Pensacola, day after day, rally after rally, sometimes two in different cities on the same day.
Meanwhile, in an office park in San Antonio, Texas, an unknown politician by the name of Brad Parscale was preparing to run a virtual campaign on social media, raise money, and post ads on Google, Twitter, and Facebook to an audience. Aim, largely using the names of people who had signed up to receive tickets to Trump’s protests during the primary and general elections.
You already know the result of the more than 300 Trump protests in 2015 and 2016, complemented by Parscale’s expert manipulation of Facebook and Twitter with some Russian hackers and mischief on social media. Won.
And he planned to win again in 2020 by following the same playbook: dozens, maybe even a hundred rallies, complemented by a new digital Parscale operation. he labeled the “Death Star” in a May tweet.
So how is the Death Star shooting, Brad boy?
Parscale was removed as campaign chairman this week, replaced by an old Chris Christie fact named Bill Stepien, one of whose highlights of his career was being named in the infamous “Bridgegate” scandal involving the closure of several Bridge lanes. George Washington in 2013. Stepien saw duty as “field director” during the 2016 Trump campaign, and as things stand now, driving traffic is all he has left to do in 2020.
As for those manifestations? Well, Trump appeared in a grand total of 10 protests in January and February before the coronavirus took over the White House and began strangling his grand plans. Last month, a dark red rally was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was intended to kick off the 2020 Trump general election campaign. You know how wonderful it turned out. After bragging on social media about a million tickets that had been sold for the Tulsa arena (which had only 19,000), Trump was able to “fill” the arena with just over 6,000 of his most loyal voters. An “overflow” demonstration outside the arena was canceled when no one appeared.
A few days later, Trump held another rally at the Dream City megachurch in Phoenix, attended by some 3,000 students.
Few attendees of any of the demonstrations wore protective masks, despite a local ordinance requiring them in Arizona. There was an outbreak of coronavirus in Tulsa after the rally there, and Oklahoma Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, who attended the rally, tested positive for the virus this week. On Wednesday, Oklahoma experienced its largest one-day increase in coronavirus cases, increasing by 1,075, almost a 5 percent increase in the state’s total number of cases.
The Republican National Committee announced plans for a reduced convention next month in Jacksonville, complete with social distancing and masks. Most of the convention events will be restricted to about 2,500 delegates. On the last day, August 27, when Trump gives his acceptance speech, alternate delegates and guests will raise the total allowed inside the arena to approximately 7,000. The Trump campaign has been scrambling for new venues to hold protests where they won’t have to worry about the kind of depressed turnout they had in Tulsa. As of this weekend, no new protests were scheduled.
But even more troubling for Trump was a story in the New York Times last week that reported that Facebook is considering banning political ads in place sometime before the November general election. Facebook advertising was as important to Trump in 2016 as rallies were, and with the campaign facing the possibility of no more protests, Facebook seemed to be even more important this year.
If Facebook posts political ads and Twitter continues to check Trump’s tweets for lies and hate speech, all he’ll be left with will be the Rose Garden press conferences as we saw on Tuesday, when Trump accused Biden of being against Windows (and accused him!) Of plans to disarm the United States military, among other accusations and deranged cries of “Where’s Hunter?” referring to the son of his rival, Hunter Biden. By Thursday, Trump was criticizing Biden’s plans to deprive household dishwashers of water and blind everyone with low-voltage LED bulbs.
We haven’t even gotten into Trump’s craters. He’s down two digits nationally, he’s down two digits in most battlefield states, and he’s even down two digits among his own Republican base when it comes to his performance in handling the coronavirus. And then there are the worst numbers of all: nearly 140,000 dead, and the CDC estimates 170,000 by August 8. A record 77,000 people were diagnosed with the virus on Thursday and 926 died. The numbers keep going up almost every day.
There are only 15 weeks left before Election Day on November 3, and a lot can happen in American politics in 15 weeks. We learned that in swords in 2016, didn’t we? But Trump is not just facing Joe Biden. He is facing a virus that does not belong to a political party, he does not watch Fox News and he does not care how many times the President of the United States tries to desire it. The virus has a big vote this year, and so far, it’s voting against Trump. One of the tragedies of our political system is that so many people have to die for a corrupt and incompetent man to lose the presidential elections.
