CLEVELAND – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is scheduled to return to Ohio for the second time in a week with a campaign stop Thursday afternoon at a charter school in Cleveland.
The scheduled 2:00 p.m. appearance at the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy is not open to the public.
The event will be Trump’s second stop in Ohio in four days. He appeared Monday at the Canfield Fair near Youngstown, an area where he drew more votes than Ohio Gov. John Kasich during the swing state’s Republican presidential primary.
The campaign of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton will try to steal a march on Trump by holding a news conference in Cleveland, where two retired generals from Ohio will state her case that she is more experienced and has the right temperament and judgment to occupy the White House while Trump has made controversial comments appearing to support nuclear weapons and dictators and criticizing NATO, all evidence of what the Clinton camp calls the “dangers of Donal Trump’s candidacy.”
The campaign also released a TV ad blasting Trump’s treatment of active-duty service men and women and veterans, a group he has courted with promises to improve care.
Ohio is viewed as one of the key states Trump must capture in his bid to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November election.
Trump leveled unusually harsh criticism against the U.S. military during a national security forum on NBC Wednesday night.
Trump said that America’s generals have been “reduced to rubble” under President Barack Obama and suggested he would fire some of them if he wins the presidency in November.
Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton each fielded 30 minutes of questions about their experience and judgment to be commander in chief. While the candidates never appeared on stage together, their back-to-back sessions served as a preview of sorts for their upcoming debates.
By virtue of a coin flip, Clinton took the stage first and quickly found herself responding at length to questions about her years in government. She reiterated that she had made mistakes in relying on a personal email account and private server as secretary of state and in voting for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a senator. But Clinton defended her support for U.S. military intervention to help oust a dictator in Libya, despite the chaotic aftermath and asked to be judged on the “totality” of her record.