This time he gets a MUCH smaller packed house….
Stocked with mostly young supporters…
Who where mostly without masks in a state with climbing virus infections…
After a disappointing showing at his campaign rally over the weekend, President Donald Trump renewed his performance for a packed crowd of students on Tuesday, telling his Arizona audience that they were guardians in a cultural war over the heritage of the country.
“We’re here today to declare that we will never cave to the left wing and the left-wing intolerance,” the president said at a Students for Trump event in Phoenix.
The appearance, at the Dream City megachurch, was one of his first rallies since taking a three-month hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic. Images from the event showed a large crowd tightly packed together, with almost no one wearing protective masks. There were no temperature checks for the estimated 3,000 cheering attendees who, like many of Trump’s staunchest fans, ignored a new local ordinance requiring them to wear a mask, despite a public-health plea from the Democratic mayor on Monday.
The coronavirus is out of control in the Grand Canyon State after its governor lifted a stay-at-home order last month, and the president is polling relatively poorly here against his presumptive Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Low attendance at Trump’s event in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday (only 6,200 of the venue’s 19,000 seats were occupied) made headlines and overshadowed the president’s comeback message. But on Tuesday, he recast that rally as a roiling success, calling it the “number one show in Fox history for a Saturday night.”
Trump started 10 minutes early — uncharacteristic for a president who routinely begins rallies as much as an hour late. His appearance came as Fox News was airing an interview with the president’s former national security adviser John Bolton, whose tell-all book of his time in the White House makes damning accusations of corruption by Trump. Trump and his administration have condemned the book and tried to block its release.
Speaking to the young audience, Trump tapped into campus culture wars on free speech to draw a divide between his supporters and protesters fighting against racism and police brutality following the death of George Floyd, an African American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Trump declared the students in the audience as the cultural defenders of not only his movement but also of American values as a whole, portraying Democrats as intolerant and “totalitarian….