President Donald Trump announced Thursday he was cancelling the Jacksonville, Florida portion of the Republican National Convention due to the state becoming a COVID-19 hotspot.
‘So I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida component of the GOP convention,’ Trump said at the top of his Thursday press briefing.
The convention would start on August 24 in Charlotte, North Carolina – which had always been the plan – before the president got in a fight with the state’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper who couldn’t guarantee he’d be allowed to fill a stadium.
Trump didn’t commit to fully holding the RNC back in Charlotte, saying he would hold ‘tele-rallies’ through the week.
‘And I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form, but we won’t do a big, crowded convention per say. It’s just not the right time for that,’ the president said.
President Trump is photographed accepting the Republican nomination in 2016 in Cleveland. Trump wanted the same fanfare at his 2020 nominating convention and moved the main events to Jacksonville, Florida, but cancelled that portion Thursday
President Trump’s 2020 convention will no longer be partially held in Jacksonville, Florida. Here is a look at the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland, Ohio
Thursday’s announcement marked the end of a six-week attempt to create from scratch what organizers were calling a ‘convention celebration’ in Jacksonville, as GOP delegates were still going to gather in Charlotte, but all the primetime speeches would take place in the Florida city.
In recent days, local officials expressed doubt that they could pull it off.
Jacksonville’s Sheriff Mike Williams warned that they were ‘past the point of no return’ of being able to get proper security protocols in place to host a widely attended, in-person convention starring the president of the United States.
‘With less than 40 days until the expected Republican National Convention is slated to arrive in Jacksonville, I am compelled to express my significant concerns with the viability of the event,’ said Williams, the Duval County sheriff, in a statement.
Jacksonville’s City Council President Thomas Hazouri told the Miami Herald that organizers should ‘start thinking about going virtual or scaling down even more than they’ve done.’
Hazouri said in his interview with the Herald that Republicans ‘need to have a plan A,B,C,D, and E,’ since time is tight and coronavirus cases in Florida continue to grow.
Republicans were starting to outline some of the COVID-19 precautions they would take.
A memo obtained by ABC News said that Jacksonville convention attendees were to do an at-home COVID-19 test before traveling to the city – though mentioned testing, sanitizing, temperature checks would be available on-site, as well as PPE – personal protective equipment.
But the memo didn’t say anything about attendees having to wear masks or social distancing, just that the convention would follow the current local health guidelines.
Trump’s June 11 announcement came when Florida was seeing under 1,700 cases a day.
More recently the state hit a high water mark of more than 15,000 positive COVID-19 cases.
Trump started his Thursday briefing with images of the U.S. map behind him that showed Florida as a hotspot.
It took several minutes for him to get to the news of the announcement as he talked about
The president said he was meeting with his political advisers who were showing him images of the stage and other ‘convention celebration’ components.
‘I never thought we could have something look so good, so fast,’ he said.
‘Everything was going well, a tremendous list of speakers. Thousands of people wanting to be there – and in some cases desperately be there – they wanted to attend. People making travel arrangements all over the country. They wanted to be there,’ the president continued.
‘The pageantry the signs, the excitement were really, really top of the line,’ he added.
Trump said he looked at his 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 in Florida is not the right time.’
‘I have to protect the American people, that’s what I’ve always done, that’s what I always will do, that’s what I’m about,’ Trump said.
Two polls in Florida that were released Thursday also showed him significantly down in the Sunshine State, which is essentially a must-win if he wants to beat the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the Electoral College.