Last month, Donald Trump promised to return to the campaign trail in a big way. Close to a million people had requested tickets for his comeback rally, he bragged, necessitating accommodations for an overflow crowd. In the end, only about 6,000 people turned out and the president aired his grievances before a sea of empty seats. Trump was infuriated and embarrassed. But at least a president who thrives on pageantry had his Republican convention to look forward to.
Now, however, even that event seems to be falling apart. With coronavirus taking a particularly hard toll on Florida, the host of next month’s shindig, a growing number of prominent Republicans are announcing plans to stay home. Already a handful of Republicans had announced they would not attend, either because of the threat of infection or, in the case of Mitt Romney, because his criticism of the president has made him a persona non grata. On Monday, the New York Times reported four more planned no-shows: Senators Roy Blunt and Pat Roberts and Florida Representatives Francis Rooney. Even more appear to be on the fence about the whole thing, including Marco Rubio of Florida; John Thune, the number two Republican in the Senate; and Liz Cheney, who has been increasingly critical of Trump as of late. “Everybody just assumes no one is going,” Illinois Representative Darin LaHood, an honorary state co-chair of the Trump campaign who has RSVP’d no to the convention, told the Times.
The Republican convention has already been upended once by the pandemic, relocated to Florida after Charlotte, North Carolina, couldn’t guarantee a gathering space for thousands of people. Democrats pushed their Milwaukee convention back from July to August, but even plans for smaller satellite gatherings seem uncertain with the coronavirus situation going from bad to worse. Trump, by contrast, clearly resents the prospect of missing out on a chance to throw a big party in his honor, and has pushed for the event to go forward, virus be damned. But reality may get in the way: Jacksonville now mandates face masks and other precautions, which will improve public safety but undermine the image Trump had hoped to project of a country on the other side of the crisis. Floridians themselves are unenthused at the prospect of playing host. A surge of new infections is making many Republicans, including Chuck Grassley, squeamish about attending. And Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic, along with the escalation of his racist culture wars, may lead some vulnerable Republicans to want to keep their distance; Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, both noted for their “disappointment” with the president, have each said they do not plan to attend.
Trump’s true believers have no compunction about potentially sacrificing their lives for the sake of the president’s ego. “It’s a risk you have to take,” Morton Blackwell, an 80-year-old RNC member from Virginia, told the Times. “You take risks every day. You drive down the street and a cement truck could crash into you. You can’t not do what you have to do because of some possibility of a bad result.” But many Republicans are less cavalier; even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has wavered about the idea of having a convention at all. “We will have to wait and see how things look in late August to determine if we can safely convene that many people,” he said last week.