he's baaaaaack
Aides say Trump is itching to hit the campaign trail and could soon be holding 6 events a day
Air Force One will be racking up the miles this week, as President Trump plans on traveling to multiple states for campaign events in an attempt to make up for lost time, several aides told The Washington Post.
In Florida on Monday night, Trump held his first rally since being hospitalized with COVID-19, and aides told the Post he is adamant about traveling to several battleground states this week for campaign events — he will be in Pennsylvania and Iowa, followed by a return trip to Florida. Over the weekend, Trump will likely visit Ohio and Wisconsin, a senior campaign adviser told the Post, and he wants to go to North Carolina soon.
While Trump will likely attend two to three events a day over the next few weeks, in the final days leading into the election, he'll probably be holding as many as six events a day, senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told the Post. "You're going to see President Trump flat-out outworking Joe Biden down the home stretch here, just as he has shown in his previous campaign," Miller said.
The Trump campaign and White House are both downplaying the fact that it might not be the best idea to have a 74-year-old man who was just hospitalized for COVID-19 and received experimental drugs and supplemental oxygen hit the road.
Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California at San Francisco, told the Post that based on what the public knows about Trump's course of treatment for COVID-19, she would "advise him to rest for about a week more, at least." She said she finds his busy schedule "concerning," adding that coronavirus patients who have had enough symptoms to be hospitalized "definitely report a lot of fatigue, people report still feeling short of breath and having a persistent cough, and there are even longer-term symptoms."
As for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has been holding small events with a limited number of attendees, he criticized Trump for appearing at large gatherings amid the pandemic, which has left at least 214,000 Americans dead. "His reckless personal conduct since his diagnosis has been unconscionable," Biden said Monday in Ohio. "The longer Donald Trump is president, the more reckless he seems to get."