‘The timing of the event is not right.’ Trump calls off Jacksonville convention
In a stunning reversal, President Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he was canceling the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville next month, abruptly calling off an event he’d pushed only weeks earlier to relocate from North Carolina to his home state.
Trump announced the decision during a White House news conference, saying “the timing of the event is not right” amid the surging coronavirus outbreak in Florida, where earlier in the day officials announced a state record of 173 COVID-19 deaths.
“I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida, component of the GOP convention,” Trump said, adding that his campaign would still hold “tele-rallies” and online events. “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.”
Trump’s announcement — which caught some of his closest allies off guard after he pushed the event out of Charlotte, N.C., in the hope that he could give his nomination acceptance speech in a packed arena in Florida — signals a shift in position on the novel coronavirus pandemic, which he’d attempted to write off for months as a minimal threat.
The decision also avoids a potentially embarrassing clash with Jacksonville city and law enforcement officials, who warned early this week that attempts to gather thousands of law enforcement officers to police the event had fallen short. A workshop with the city council was scheduled Friday to go over make-or-break legislation that some council members had said they might not support.
“We appreciate President Donald Trump considering our public health and safety concerns in making this incredibly difficult decision,” Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams and Mayor Lenny Curry said in a joint statement.
Trump’s cancellation came suddenly. Convention planners were scrambling as late as Wednesday to try to bring together the convention, which the Republican National Committee had rushed to organize after announcing plans on June 11 to pull festivities out of Charlotte. Even Thursday, planners were outlining for McClatchy the plans the RNC was making for testing delegates for COVID-19 and describing the festival-like atmosphere planned for the downtown area of Jacksonville.
An anticipated 7,500 guests of the national party were expected to attend Trump’s scaled-back speech in Jacksonville and participate in an outdoor festival the RNC was planning to hold near VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, the indoor site the national party planned to use for evening speeches.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced last week that attendees for the president’s nomination speech on Aug. 27, the final day of the convention, would be restricted to delegates, a single guest per delegate and alternate delegates. Speeches set for earlier in the convention were restricted to the party’s roughly 2,500 delegates only.
Corporations that typically sponsor convention concerts with well-known artists, throw giant bashes for attendees and pay for meals and hospitality suites for state delegations were not signing on, sources familiar with the convention planning told McClatchy, citing financial limitations for many businesses during the pandemic, the inability for many sponsors to attend official convention events and the cancellation of much of the Democratic National Convention in August in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
But roughly $20 million in contributions had been pledged. And most delegates were still planning to enjoy the beachside hotels assigned by the RNC to their delegations, making a vacation out of the four-day political event that would have required travelers from several states to quarantine for 14 days upon their arrival and others to quarantine for just as long on their return home from the coronavirus hot spot.
Most alternate delegates had planned to attend as well, representatives for nearly a dozen state parties said this week.
Then, the president on Thursday evening said he decided to call it all off.
Trump, at the White House, said Florida officials did not ask him to cancel the convention. But he said Florida’s coronavirus outbreak, which as of Thursday had killed at least 5,518 people, has surged over the last six weeks to levels too problematic to ignore.
“I could see the media saying, this is very unsafe. I don’t want to be in that position,” Trump said. “It’s safety — not because of the media, but that’s what they would say.”
Trump, who in recent weeks had said repeatedly that the coronavirus would “disappear,” said the party needed to ”set an example.”
“It’s hard for us to say we’re going to have a lot of people packed in a room and then other people shouldn’t do it,” he said.
Speaking about Florida, where Trump claims full-time residency, he 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.”
He said convention business would go on. Delegates will still gather in person in Charlotte to nominate the president at the RNC’s summer meeting the week before the convention was to take place in Jacksonville, Trump said Thursday, telling reporters that planning had been going “well.”
“The pageantry, the signs, the excitement were really really top of the line, but I looked at my team and I said the timing for this event 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 not the right time.”
Now, Trump will head into the fall without the launching pad of the convention celebration he’d desired in Florida, a key battleground state he likely must win in order to be reelected.
McDaniel and Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters, a Trump ally who said he was among those surprised by the cancellation, issued statements thanking Trump for putting public safety above his own political interests. Even some critics thanked the president for calling the event off.
“I’m happy he’s taking it more seriously,” said U.S. Rep. Donna Shalala, a Miami Democrat and former Health and Human Services secretary. “But it’s all because he wants to get reelected. It has nothing to do with following the science. They looked at the polls. Four polls came out today. They’re not winning seniors, and he’s not winning Florida.”
Some critics mocked the idea that Trump believed he could plan a convention in two months, an event that often takes two years to plan.
“This thing was always trying to drive an aircraft carrier through the eye of a needle. It was never going to work,” said Rick Wilson, a Florida Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a political organization founded by current and former Republicans who want to keep Trump from winning a second term. “When the history of all this is written ... people will look back on this and have a sad laugh because he tried to convince himself and everyone else that the place wasn’t on fire. And it is.”
McClatchy DC reporters Alex Daugherty and Michael Wilner contributed to this report. Tampa Bay Times political editor Steve Contorno and Herald-Times reporter Kirby Wilson also contributed to this report.
This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 5:51 PM with the headline "‘The timing of the event is not right.’ Trump calls off Jacksonville convention."