Six months into his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made a telling admission.
“I don’t normally do stops like this,” he told the officers at a local police precinct in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who were there to deliver an endorsement.
The political newcomer had all but abandoned the traditional campaign model that steered his rivals toward crowded diners, Rotary clubhouses and the occasionally combative town hall. Having spent much of his career in the media spotlight, Trump instead preferred headline-grabbing settings – giant arenas with rowdy crowds.
It was striking, then, that Trump chose small-scale settings for his first campaign outings last weekend. Without the novelty that helped catapult him into the White House in 2016 or the presidential jet he used as a campaign prop in 2020, some allies have encouraged Trump to freshen up his image by modifying the way he campaigns, making smaller stops, especially when there are advantageous opportunities for him to do so.
That approach was on display last Saturday, when he appeared in two early voting states, speaking to hundreds – not thousands – of people at a New Hampshire high school auditorium and the South Carolina state house. In New Hampshire, he delivered scripted remarks at the annual state GOP meeting. And in South Carolina, flanked by his newly announced state leadership team, the former president promised to run a campaign that would look to the future after spending much of the previous two years fixated on the past.
But perhaps the most surprising moment of Trump’s campaign debut was his impromptu visit to a South Carolina ice cream and hamburger shop, where he greeted voters, ordered a chocolate-dipped cone, and took selfies with patrons. At one point during the stop, Trump was captured on video bowing his head in reverence as a woman prayed over him – the kind of…
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