Trump to Hold Rally in Arizona as Covid-19 Cases Surge in the State

President Donald Trump is looking to put the setback of his poorly attended Oklahoma rally behind him with visit to Arizona on Tuesday, where he’ll return to a familiar issue that helped him win the White House in 2016: border security.

Trump’s schedule includes a stop to tout progress building his promised border wall and an address to young supporters at a Phoenix church. The state was once a reliably Republican stronghold, but polls show that both Trump and incumbent GOP Senator Martha McSally trail their Democratic rivals.

And despite the president’s push to reopen the economy and downplay the coronavirus outbreak, the number of sick in Arizona is again rising. Weekly case counts are up 284% since Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, lifted his stay-at-home order in mid-May, according Joe Gerald, an associate professor of public health policy and management at the University of Arizona who works with the state and colleagues to analyze Covid-19 data.

The Arizona visit follows an embarrassment for the president on Saturday, when thousands of empty seats greeted him at his first campaign rally in three months in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He also endured reports last week from a damaging new book by his former national security adviser, John Bolton, that will go on sale Tuesday.

Trump can ill afford further erosion of his political standing, particularly in a state so crucial to his re-election efforts. Trump won Arizona by about 3.5 percentage points in 2016 but now trails presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by about four points, according to an average of polling by RealClearPolitics. A loss in the state may cripple the president’s hopes of re-election.

In Yuma, he’ll commemorate the completion of 200 miles of border wall built during his administration, an effort to recapture momentum by revisiting his promises to stop illegal immigration. But the visit also highlights Trump’s retreat from promises earlier in his presidency that 500 miles of border wall would be completed by the end of 2020.

The construction project was a trademark of the president’s first campaign, and Trump has begun to again champion the milestone in recent weeks. He’s also claimed the wall has played a crucial role in stopping the spread of coronavirus in the U.S.

“Very, very few people are coming through on our border,” Trump said last week in an interview with Fox News. “We have a tremendous border. But think of it - and Tijuana, Mexico, it’s one of the most infected places on Earth. And we have a wall between Tijuana and San Diego. It’s like a beautiful, very powerful wall.”

But the vast majority of wall construction during the president’s administration has replaced existing fencing, with less than two dozen of the 200 miles built in areas where there wasn’t already a barrier. And Vice President Mike Pence, who chairs the president’s coronavirus task force, said last week that the virus is spreading from Americans returning home from Mexico, not from immigration.

On Monday, more than 20% of new COVID-19 tests reported in Arizona came back positive, compared to less than 1% in New York. Arizona reported its seventh straight daily record of confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases in hospitals at 1,992, up 144% since Memorial Day.

Duce said last week the state’s “trend is headed in the wrong direction,” but so far has rejected calls to slow reopening and discounted criticism that he lifted his stay-at-home order too quickly.

In Yuma, Trump will receive a briefing on wall construction and then participate in a roundtable discussion with local leaders. Top officials from the Department of Homeland Security, including acting Secretary Chad Wolf, acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and Acting Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Mark Morgan are expected to attend.

While the president and his top advisers believe his strong anti-immigration message helped propel him to the White House in 2016, Trump’s decision to frame the 2018 midterms as a referendum on those policies was seen as a strategic misstep. Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives, and McSally narrowly lost her first Senate bid to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel

QUICKTAKE ON SOCIAL:

Follow QuickTake on Twitter: twitter.com/quicktake

Like QuickTake on Facebook: facebook.com/quicktake

Follow QuickTake on Instagram: instagram.com/quicktake

Subscribe to our newsletter

Email us at quicktakenews@gmail.com

QuickTake by Bloomberg is a global news network delivering up-to-the-minute analysis on the biggest news, trends and ideas for a new generation of leaders.