Washington:
Donald Trump is scheduled to hold his first campaign rally since his criminal trial began in New York on Saturday, with a crowd in North Carolina set to hear the former president repeat his outrage over the unprecedented legal process. It seems like it will happen.
The Republican billionaire is scheduled to address supporters in the coastal city of Wilmington, seeking to thwart Democrats' hopes of reversing the battleground state he won in Wilmington in 2016 and 2020.
But going to North Carolina isn't the only thing on President Trump's mind, with opening statements in his hush money trial starting in New York within 48 hours after jury selection is finalized on Friday. This is because it is planned.
President Trump was acquitted of 34 counts of business fraud as part of a scheme to hide payments to porn actresses to prevent allegations of sexual encounters from coming to light just before the 2016 presidential election in which he defeated Hillary Clinton. Admitted. .
President Trump has denounced the allegations of a political “witch hunt” and has repeatedly complained that the trial, the first for a former U.S. president, is hindering his campaign.
“I'm supposed to be campaigning in a lot of different places…and I've been sitting in that frigid room for days now, morning till night,” he said Thursday in a Manhattan courtroom.
Nevertheless, Trump continues to get his message out to the public, both on social media and in daily remarks to the throngs of reporters covering the trial in New York.
“This is a level of election interference that we have never seen in the United States,” he claimed on his platform, Truth Social, on Friday.
His speech in North Carolina is likely to follow a similar line of criticism, although Trump has been ordered by Judge Juan Marchan not to attack relatives of witnesses, prosecutors or court staff, a restriction that Republicans are pushing back against. He called it “very unfair.”
～Battleground North Carolina～
The last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina was Barack Obama in 2008, but the party believes the state could be competitive in November.
In 2020, when North Carolina's Democratic governor won re-election, Joe Biden lost the state by just 75,000 votes.
The party hopes to capitalize on growing urban populations and anger over abortion regulations introduced after the U.S. Supreme Court stripped away the right to abortion procedures nationwide.
With Trump likely scheduled to go on trial in New York for several weeks, and further charges pending in Washington, Georgia and Florida, Biden has begun ramping up his campaign appearances.
This week, he made several visits to Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, and made his first public remarks acknowledging President Trump's legal problems. This was something he had been holding back on for a long time.
“Under my predecessor — a busy man right now — Pennsylvania lost 275,000 jobs,” the 81-year-old Biden quipped at an event.
The White House said Biden was not following Trump's trial, adding that he was “focused on the American people.”
Meanwhile, Biden's poll numbers have steadily improved since his State of the Union address in March, and he and Trump, 77, are now tied on average nationally.
Vice President Kamala Harris has already visited North Carolina four times this year, including once in March for a joint meeting with Biden.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
