Trump abruptly cancels RNC in Jacksonville, a month before it was to start
President Donald Trump abruptly canceled the Jacksonville portion of the Republican National Convention Thursday, throwing the event into chaos a month before it’s scheduled to start.
Trump had forced Republicans to move the event to Florida after failing to get guarantees he could have a full house in Charlotte because of the coronavirus. But Jacksonville, like the rest of Florida, has been hit with a surge of COVID-19 cases. Trump said Thursday it was irresponsible to hold the convention there.
“I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida, component of the GOP convention,” he told reporters at the White House. “We’re going to do some other things with tele-rallies and online the week that we’re discussing ... I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form. But we won’t do a big crowded convention per se, it’s just not the right time for that.”
It did not appear that Trump’s announcement Thursday would dramatically change what is planned for Charlotte. The city is still scheduled to hold the “business” part of the convention at the end of August. That includes 336 of 2,500 delegates in town for the renomination of the president and vice president.
Three nights of “celebration,” capped by Trump’s formal acceptance of the nomination on Aug. 27, had been scheduled for Jacksonville. Trump suggested he would now give his acceptance speech online.
“We’ll do a fairly reasonably quick meeting in North Carolina,” Trump said.
Trump’s about-face on Jacksonville comes four weeks before the convention’s scheduled Aug. 24 start. Organizers in Charlotte have been working on the event for nearly two years. Jacksonville had barely two months.
There were growing signs that the convention faced hurdles there.
Last week GOP officials said they were scaling back the convention because of the pandemic, limiting delegates and holding some events outdoors. And a group filed a lawsuit calling the convention a public “nuisance” because of the threatened spread of the coronavirus. And this week Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said he could “not say with confidence that this event and our community will not be at risk.”
“At this point, we are simply past the point of no return to execute the event with safety and security that is our obligation,” he said in a statement.
On Thursday the Florida Times-Union ran a story about city council disputes over convention funding. The headline was “RNC Plans in Jeopardy. . . “ A big vote was scheduled for next Tuesday.
“We’re trying to do in a couple weeks what most cities do in a matter of two years. Its a hurry up offense,” Jacksonville City Council member Matt Carlucci told the Observer Thursday. “We caught a tiger by the tail and we’re circling all around and we can’t hang on, But we can’t let go.”
Charlotte reaction
Republican Ed Driggs, a member of Charlotte’s City Council, called the sudden move to Florida “a hopeless undertaking.”
“The president decided he might get a better deal somewhere else,” he said Thursday night. “For one, moving the thing on such short notice after we had been working on it for years, was an ambitious, hopeless undertaking.”
Driggs said Charlotte still won’t reap the economic benefit of a full convention, once expected to bring in more than $100 million.
“I think the whole thing is a sorry saga,” he said. “We always knew that the virus was really the problem. There was this political wrangling but we had a public health issue.”
Gov. Roy Cooper talked to Trump weeks ago, and told him he couldn’t give him the guarantee he wanted that would allow 19,000 people in Spectrum Center with no masks or social distancing. He could not be reached Thursday night.
Charlotte City Council member Dimple Ajmera applauded Cooper’s handling of the RNC in early June — when the president sought assurances for a full-scale convention.
”This just goes to show that we have to put public health first,” Ajmera said Thursday. “I’m very appreciative of the fact that Gov. Cooper stood strong in his conviction to keep people safe. He didn’t allow us to be bullied by Mr. Trump.”
John Lassiter, CEO of the Charlotte Host Committee, declined to comment Thursday night.
Tariq Bokhari, a Republican city council member, said the cancellation of the events in Jacksonville are an “opportunity” for Charlotte to try to work something out that falls in between a full-blown convention and the official business being hosted in the city on August 24.
“You literally never get a second chance like this,” he told the Observer. “There’s an opportunity because of this change that we have a blank slate again, a clean slate again. There’s an opportunity for us to balance health and safety with economic impact and I hope we all come back to the table in good faith to do so.”
Mayor Pro Tem Julie Eiselt said she was surprised that Trump had canceled the convention in Jacksonville.
“He seems to bully his way to get what he wants,” she told the Observer Thursday. “It shows Gov. Cooper was exactly right. Now that is playing out in Florida.”
Speaking about the Florida portion of the convention, Trump said, “It’s a place I love. I love that state. The drawings look absolutely beautiful. I never thought we could have something look so good so fast with everything going on. And everything was going well. A tremendous list of speakers.”
“The pageantry, the signs, the excitement were really really top of the line, but I looked at my team and I said the timing of this is not right, it’s just not right with what’s happened recently the flare up in Florida. To have a big convention, it’s just not the right time.”
The ‘right decision’
Convention CEO Marcia Lee Kelly called Trump’s move “the right decision, as the health and safety of our team, our partners in Jacksonville, and the American people is paramount. I’m incredibly grateful for my team and staff who worked around the clock to plan this historic 5-star event, and we look forward to formally re-nominating President Trump.”
Trump said he was told they could “make this work very easily” and it could be done safely and responsibly. The president said that he decided to call it off. “I have to protect the American people,” he said.
In a statement, Charlotte city spokesman Cory Burkarth said: “We have an agreement in place with the Republican National Committee to host a substantially scaled down business meeting and that is what we are planning to do.”
Staff writers Danielle Chemtob and Alison Kuznitz and Michael Wilner of McClatchy’s Washington Bureau contributed.
This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 5:59 PM.