Donald Trump plans to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden in late October, according to a report.
The former president’s campaign event is scheduled for October 27, NBC News reported. The rally will mark the first time that Trump will speak to his supporters in his deep-blue home town.
A campaign official told the outlet that Trump hopes to host “major arena rallies” in battleground states in the last few weeks ahead of the November 5 election. New York, of course, is not one of them.
Trump earned just 12.3 per cent of the vote in 2020 in Manhattan, or New York County, compared to Joe Biden’s 86.8 per cent. The GOP nominee lost by an even greater percentage in 2016, when he garnered just 10 per cent of Manhattan’s vote compared to Hillary Clinton’s 87.2 per cent.
Despite his campaign’s swing-state-focused plans, Trump will also be visiting two consistently blue states later this week: California and Colorado.
Trump had initially floated the idea of holding a rally at the massive arena in May, days before he was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records by a New York City jury after he gave so-called hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.
The former president was also found liable for defamation and sexual abuse of writer E Jean Carroll. The former Elle columnist had sued Trump for raping her in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman in New York in 1996, and then “destroying” her reputation when he claimed she was lying. He was not found liable for rape.
Earlier this year, he held a rallies in the Bronx and on Long Island.
His May rally in the Bronx — also a Democratic strongold — marked the first time Trump had held a rally in his home state in eight years. In 2016, his supporters gathered upstate in Buffalo during his first presidential run.