Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan this afternoon, his first event of the week.
Trump will speak from the Deltaplex Arena beginning at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The event can be viewed live in the embedded YouTube player via Right Side Broadcasting.
It’s a mystery to many of Trump’s supporters why the candidate is spending time in Michigan just eight day before the election. The Republican candidate stands virtually zero chance of winning the state, which has not voted for a Republican since 1988 and where Hillary Clinton leads in the polls by an average of 7.0 points, according to Real Clear Politics.
However, the Trump campaign has said since the beginning that Michigan would be one of the traditionally blue states that would be put in play this year, with the hope being that Trump’s economic message would appeal to voters there. So far, that doesn’t appear to be the case. But it remains to be seen what, if any, effect the recent news regarding a new FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails will have on Michigan voters.
Trump has been seizing on that news at his recent campaign events, presenting it as further proof that Hillary Clinton is corrupt and saying that the scandal is bigger than Watergate.
“I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made,” Trump said on Friday. “This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understood, and it is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected.”
However, Trump has actually not been focused on this issue as much as some Republicans would have hoped, still going on frequent tangents during his rallies and not hammering in the Hillary Clinton story quite as hard as he has the opportunity to.
This is the first of two rallies Trump will hold in Michigan on Monday, the second taking place Warren.