TRENTON (AP) – After a long week in court, Donald Trump is heading to the Jersey Shore.
And his campaign said he’ll be joined by “tens of thousands” of his friends.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, expects to draw what his team is calling a “mega crowd” at a rally in the southern New Jersey resort town of Wildwood. It will be held 241 kilometres south of the New York City courthouse where he has been forced to spend most weekdays sitting silently through his felony hush money trial.
The beachfront gathering is designed to serve as a show of force at a critical moment for Trump, a presidential candidate known for drawing huge crowds.
Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said the “tens of thousands” expected attendees would be a notable contrast to the number that typically show up for President Joe Biden’s political events, which Miller described as being only “eight circles, two of which are empty”.
Trump’s gathering in deep-blue New Jersey comes less than six months before Election Day.
The former president’s extraordinary legal woes, which include three other unrelated criminal cases, have emerged as a central focus of the campaign.
Trump has repeatedly accused the Biden administration and Democratic officials in New York of using the legal system to block his return to the White House. Prosecutors allege the former president broke the law to conceal an affair with an actor that would have hurt his first presidential bid.
And while Trump will almost certainly seize on his legal woes, a judge’s gag order – and the threat of jail – will limit Trump’s ability to comment publicly on witnesses, jurors and some others connected to the New York trial, which is expected to consume much of the month.
The judge in the case already has fined Trump USD9,000 for violating the order and warned that jail could follow if he doesn’t comply.
Trump’s responsibilities as a defendant have limited his ability to win over voters on the campaign trail.
He spent last week’s off-day from court in the general election battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Michigan. And he faced a massive crowd yesterday in New Jersey, a reliably Democratic state. Parts of New Jersey have deep-red enclaves and the southern shoreline in particular draws tourists and summer homeowners from neighboring Pennsylvania, a key swing state.
Yesterday’s visit to the New Jersey Shore resort isn’t Trump’s first.
