Trump campaign pledges ‘full speed’ ahead as coronavirus diagnosis upends already chaotic presidential race

President Trump’s campaign pledged to keep operating at “full speed” on Saturday despite his coronavirus diagnosis — a stunning turn of events that has sidelined the incumbent in the home stretch of his re-election campaign and cast uncertainty over his electoral prospects.

Trump vowed to return to the campaign trail Saturday evening in a video address from Walter Reed military hospital, where he decamped to Friday to seek treatment for COVID-19, hours after his campaign said it would deploy top surrogates to key battleground states as a stopgap until the president can return to rallies that have long been his lifeblood.

“I have to be back, because we still have to make America great again,” Trump said in the video. “I’ll be back. I think I’ll be back soon. And I look forward to finishing up the campaign the way it was started and the way we’ve been doing it.”

But analysts and some Republicans were casting doubts on the president’s ability to bounce back with voting already underway and the focus of the election swinging forcefully onto the main issue Trump has long worked to downplay: the coronavirus pandemic.

“The reality is there is no more Trump campaign for the remainder of this election cycle,” former Mitt Romney aide Ryan Williams said. “They’re no longer in control of their own destiny. The remainder of this campaign will be determined by how people view the president’s leadership on COVID-19 and the way his administration handles the crisis involving the president’s health.”

Democratic rival Joe Biden had been working to make the election a referendum on Trump’s handling of the virus that has killed more than 209,000 Americans and infected some 7.3 million before the president became the most high-profile patient.

And Trump’s attempts to shift that focus toward Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett are at least temporarily on hold as the president and at least three senators battle the potentially deadly disease.

“The Supreme Court was a potential issue that he could have gotten more attention on. But now we’re back to talking about the virus,” analyst J. Miles Coleman said.

Trump’s diagnosis and admission to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center scrambled a packed schedule of rallies and fundraisers planned for the president as he sought to catch Biden in both polling and — in what some insiders view as more concerning — fundraising.

The Trump campaign launched “Operation MAGA” on Saturday — a “full marshaling” of top surrogates including Vice President Mike Pence and the president’s children to “carry the campaign forward until the president returns to the trail.”

Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said it’s “full steam ahead” for the campaign with the goal of making the debates scheduled for Oct. 15 and Oct. 22 that are now shrouded in uncertainty. And he argued the effects of Trump being temporarily off the trail could be negligible as the campaign leans into its ground game and the president resumes calling into radio and television shows.

“In the short run, this hurts because Biden can talk about the virus,” O’Connell said. But depending on the swiftness of Trump’s recovery, “he may be able to have the upper hand, because everyone hasn’t voted yet.”

But Boston University professor and presidential historian Thomas Whalen said Trump not being able to have his signature rallies could hurt him.

“Trump’s strength is being on the retail end of politics,” Whalen said. Right now, “He’s not going to be able to do that, especially in the key states that in 2016 made all the difference in the world. This cannot be good news.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/33uC53U