South Carolina.- Former President Donald Trump marked a return to the large-scale rallies of his previous presidential campaigns, speaking to a crowd gathered on the streets of a small South Carolina town on a summer weekend.
“There is no place I would rather be to kick off the Fourth of July weekend than here on Main Street with thousands of hardworking patriots from South Carolina who believe in God, family and country,” Trump said on to a crowd in Pickens town center on Saturday, when temperatures soared to 35 degrees Celsius.
Randal J. Beach, the police chief of the conservative upstate community of about 3,400 residents, told The Associated Press on Sunday that his crowd estimates “were between 50,000 and 55,000.”
The heavily Republican area is popular with Republican hopefuls as they seek to attract support for South Carolina’s first presidential primary. In recent months, other candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have held events upstate, as have the two South Carolinians in the race. : Former Governor Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott.
But none drew an audience like Trump, whose appearance effectively shut down Pickens’s quintessential southern hub.
In contrast to his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, which drew thousands of people to rallies in states across the country, Trump’s 2024 campaign has been markedly different. Earlier this year, instead of addressing voters in a gym or airplane hangar, Trump held his first South Carolina campaign event inside the Statehouse in Columbia, introducing his state leadership team at a meeting by invitation only in an ornate lobby between the House and Senate.
In other states, the former president has focused his efforts on smaller events, including a series of speeches to state party organizations as he works to bolster his position with local delegates and officials.
This was only Trump’s second major rally of the 2024 campaign.
2023-07-03 05:58:10
#Thousands #attend #Trump #rally #South #Carolina
