Trump's holding a campaign rally in his 4th week in office?

Barack Obama realized, like Trump, that he thrived off large audiences, and he made liberal use of the major speech, even early in his term: In February 2009, he made several trips to promote the stimulus package and his agenda. But Obama’s events were political by implication, while outwardly aimed at boosting specific policies.

Trump by contrast is planning a straightforward campaign-style rally on Saturday. It’s at an airport, in a swing state, and it’s being advertised through his campaign website. His press secretary even called it a campaign event. Making the event a campaign event rather than a speech might afford Trump greater flexibility in who he allows to attend and who he excludes. It means that the Trump campaign will likely pick up some of the travel tab, rather than taxpayers. But it might also grant Trump more leeway to make straightforwardly political arguments and attacks that it might be unseemly for a president to make at an official event—though Trump has shown such little regard for those unwritten rules that it’s hard to imagine he could be significantly more strident.


The rally isn’t even the first step the president has taken toward a 2020 campaign. In the days between his election and his inaugural, Trump held a victory lap series of rallies, mimicking the format and even the stump speech (such as it was) that Trump used during the campaign. He also made great show of supposedly selecting, and then asking his lawyer to trademark, a slogan for the 2020 campaign while in the midst of an interview with The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty. (“Keep America Great,” but then you knew that, right?) Trump even filed papers to run for reelection on Inauguration Day.