CINCINNATI (AP) — President Donald Trump’s latest rally will be a test for both candidate and crowd.
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The Cincinnati gathering Thursday night will be Trump’s first since his audience chanted “Send her back!” about a Somali-born congresswoman during a July rally in North Carolina, raising the prospect of a 2020 presidential campaign increasingly fought along racial lines.
Nurse Cynthia Wells, who was among thousands of people who lined up hours ahead of the rally, doesn’t expect to hear the chants because Trump later expressed his disapproval. She says she won’t participate because that isn’t his message.
The chant about Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota by a roaring Greenville crowd rattled Republicans.
Trump let the chant roll at the rally. Since then, he has issued incendiary tweets and a series of attacks on a veteran African-American congressman and his predominantly black district in Baltimore.
Heightening the drama, Trump’s “Keep America Great” rally at US Bank Arena will come on the heels of two Democratic debates and will take place against a backdrop of simmering racial tension in Cincinnati.
Wells said there were some 150 people already there when she arrived a little after 8:00 a.m., nearly 11 hours before the rally. The 63-year-old woman is attending her third Trump rally, saying she likes their “energy.”
Cincinnati has long battled racial demons. And Trump’s arrival comes just a week after a black former judge, her heels dragging across a courtroom floor as her supporters shouted in anger, was physically pulled away to begin a six-month jail sentence. The sentencing of Tracie Hunter prompted the Cincinnati Enquirer opinion editor to wonder in print if the matter would be “the match to start Cincinnati’s next racial fire?”
Hunter was convicted in 2014 of a felony count involving mishandling of a confidential document involving her brother’s court job.
“I would say in a similar case, if the person was a white judge, they may not have been charged; most likely, they would have been able to walk away,” said Royce Winters, a former Cincinnati police officer who’s now director of African-American Ministries for the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati. “We know that there were some other options that she would not have had to gone through all that.”
Riots broke out in 2001 after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man, and they were followed by a black-led economic boycott of the city. Police reforms and action by community leaders have revitalized Cincinnati, but there were angry demonstrations after a University of Cincinnati police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man during a 2015 traffic stop for a missing front license plate. Charges were dropped against the white officer after two hung juries.
Hamilton County GOP Chairman Alex Triantafilou, a former judge, said he believes Trump’s rhetoric on race has been “overhyped” and that it’s more about the way he responds to “withering” attacks by his critics.
Several protests are planned around the Trump rally, including one at the nearby National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. It focuses on the slavery era and current struggles against injustice around the world.
Long accused of weaponizing race for political gain, Trump has escalated his harsh language in recent weeks, beginning with racist tweets about Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman who moved to the United States as a child, and her Democratic colleagues Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
Days later, the Greenville crowd’s “Send her back!” shouts resounded for 13 seconds as Trump paused in his speech and took in the uproar.
Democrats condemned the scene and GOP lawmakers scrambled to denounce it lest the moment come to define their party heading into the next election. Though not faulting Trump himself, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said the chant had “no place in our party and no place in this country.”
After first saying he wasn’t happy about the chant, Trump in subsequent days praised the “patriots” in the North Carolina crowd. Since then, he has not backed off his criticism of the congresswomen of color, and instead launched repeated attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore, describing the majority-black city as a “living hell.”
Trump’s reelection campaign did not respond to questions about whether the president or campaign staffers would try to prevent the chant from erupting Thursday in the same downtown Cincinnati arena that housed one of Trump’s most raucous 2016 rallies.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Wednesday that he found Trump’s comments about the congresswomen “inappropriate” but added that he would not raise the matter with the president.