Thread by @svdate

NEW -- A study by Stanford University researchers concluded that Trump rallies likely caused 30,000 new coronavirus cases and 700 additional deaths.

But Trump will do four dozen anyway, in the final weeks. Even though they are hurting him with voters.

huffpost.com/entry/trump-ra…

By wide margins, voters think these rallies are a terrible idea during a global pandemic.

58 % of likely voters nationally disapproved of Trump’s decision to hold large rallies, while only 34 % approved, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted last week.

The Dem super PAC Priorities USA found similar results in the 6 states most likely to swing the election. In PA, where Trump staged four rallies Saturday, 58 percent said Trump’s rallies made them think less favorably of Trump, while only 22 percent more favorably.

Guy Cecil, Priorities’ chairman, said he has no explanation for Trump’s behavior given the obvious polling. “Why did he tell people to inject bleach into their system? Why does he call Anthony Fauci an idiot?"

Because he is a reckless, egotistical, self-centered, uncontrollable president who is not doing anything that makes any sense,” Cecil said.

“It is because he is a reckless asshole that has no self-control and is putting hundreds of thousands of lives at risk through his policies and putting thousands of lives at risk by holding superspreader events in places across the country.”

Trump’s rallies themselves, meanwhile, are a font of misinformation about the virus, such as Trump’s repeated claims that the pandemic is “rounding the turn,” that the disease is relatively harmless and that a deployable vaccine is imminent. Those statements are all false.

At a rally last week at the Lancaster Airport in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke for 85 minutes under cloudy skies and an occasional light drizzle —

a total of 13,500 words that, except for the identification of two Republican congressmen and some others in attendance, was a mixture of exaggerations, insults and groundless smears against Biden, dubious promises about his second term and 33 specific lies.

At this and other rallies, Trump has also delivered wild claims about what Biden would do as president: abolish suburbs; abolish windows in buildings; hurt God. The claims appear to be based on nothing outside of his and Stephen Miller’s imaginations.

Rallies in front of his fervent supporters have been one of the few activities that Trump has truly seemed to enjoy as president, and he began staging them just three weeks after taking office in January 2017.

But unlike most candidates’ rally speeches that center on a particular set of themes, Trump’s have always been more a hybrid of a comedy routine and a staged professional wrestling event, with a set of known villains whom Trump verbally assaults over the course of 90 minutes.

None of that is particularly useful in the final days of a presidential campaign, when the entire point is to win local television and print media coverage to reach area voters, campaign veterans said.

“At this stage in the campaign, everyone who goes to the rally is already voting for you. It’s about getting earned media,” said Ryan Williams, who worked on the 2012 presidential campaign of GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

“But you have to have a message. If he’s going in to talk about Adam Schiff as a watermelon head, that’s not a great message.”