After a month of arduous and, at times, turbulent governing, President Donald Trump is ready for what he really loves: Campaigning.
While it is unclear what exactly Trump is campaigning for, the President will take to the road on Saturday, flying from Mar-A-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, to Melbourne, Florida, where he will address what organizers expect will be thousands of supporters at Orlando Melbourne International Airport.
Trump, ready for some relief from the confines of Washington and the limitations of the house he ran to occupy, is reverting back to the campaign-style event, basking in what energized him for months during the slog of the presidential campaign: The adulation of his supporters.
White House aides have tried to take a hands-off approach to Saturday’s event, which is being run by Trump’s 2016 campaign, Donald J. Trump for President Inc.
On Friday, though, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was headlining the event as a way to go around the media.
“People in this circle don’t always do the best job delivering his message (because) nobody does it better than he does,” Sanders said about the media.
“So he can do that very easily by taking the stage and talking directly to the people of America, addressing their concerns and being able to properly express exactly what he’s doing and what his administration has done over the last month,” Sanders said on Air Force One as the plane headed south to Florida.
While sources tell CNN that Trump feels cooped up in the White House and is itching to break out, Saturday’s event could also be a way for Trump to reset his administration after a chaotic month where the President was forced to fire his national security adviser, struggled to roll out his executive order banning travel from seven majority-Muslim countries and strained to explain a growing story about how members of his 2016 campaign made repeated contact with Russian individuals known to US intelligence.
Trump’s presidential campaign was defined by raucous events where he would deliver hour-long stemwinders, responding directly to the chants of the crowd and seemingly plugging into the energy that his supporters were throwing his way.
Former campaign aides said Friday that they were not surprised Trump was getting back on the road so early in his first term, in part because it was what fueled him for months on the campaign trail.
Michael Caputo, a former senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, said he expects this sort of campaign-style event will be the “first of many.”
“He grew very familiar with the rally concept and I expect him to return to where he is comfortable when he needs to recharge,” Caputo said. “The fact that Trump showed us a new way of winning should have given everyone a hint that he would show everyone a new way of governing.”