President Trump on Wednesday said he plans to resume traveling next week with a trip to Arizona after spending the past month largely cloistered in the White House due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think I’m going to Arizona next week, and we look forward to that,” he told reporters during a roundtable with business leaders.
“And I’m going to, I hope, Ohio very soon,” he continued. “And we’re going to start to move around, and hopefully in the not too distant future we’ll have some massive rallies and people will be sitting next to each other.”
The president’s travel has been limited in April as the coronavirus grips the U.S. Trump traveled to Virginia in late March to bid farewell to a Naval hospital ship that was headed to New York but has otherwise been homebound.
He has claimed at recent press briefings that he’s been cooped up in the White House for “months,” though he held a campaign rally on March 2 and spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida over the weekend of March 6.
Trump has been eager to get back on the road even as the number of cases in the U.S. tops 1 million, and the White House has in recent days looked at ways to accommodate that. Vice President Pence has resumed traveling in the past week, visiting a manufacturing site in Wisconsin and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
The president’s expected trips to Arizona and Ohio would double as a photo op beneficial to his reelection prospects. Arizona in particular is a key swing state heading into November, with Sen. Martha McSally (R) also facing a difficult reelection bid there.
The logistics surrounding Trump’s trip next week are likely to be different from his usual travels, where he is typically greeted by throngs of supporters and joined by numerous aides and lawmakers.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) is expected to decide this week on how and when to lift restrictions intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus that limit the number of people who can gather in a particular place or which businesses can open.
Trump on Wednesday was hopeful that he would be able to resume holding his campaign rallies in packed arenas before the general election, but he acknowledged it will depend on how quickly individual states lift their restrictions.
“I hope that we’re going to be able to do some good old-fashioned 25,000-person rallies where everyone’s going wild because they love our country,” he said.