President Donald Trump will hold a rally tonight in Nashville, Tennessee, his second such event since taking the oath of office.
Trump will be speaking from the Nashville Municipal Auditorium at 6:30 p.m. Central Time. The rally can be viewed live in the embedded YouTube player.
During the presidential campaign, Trump constantly held rallies all across the country, and his campaign became defined by these events, during which the then Republican candidate often spoke without the use of a script. He repeatedly hinted throughout the campaign that he might continue to hold rallies as president.
Indeed, Trump has done so, and he previously held a rally in Melbourne, Florida on February 18th. This event felt very much like it was occurring during the 2016 election, with Trump’s opponent now being the news media rather than Hillary Clinton.
It’s not unusual for presidents to travel the country and deliver speeches in which they defend and explain their agenda, but what is unusual is that these Trump rallies are technically campaign events. Tickets to the Nashville speech were made available on the Trump campaign website, and when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked about one of Trump’s rallies a few weeks ago, he referred reporters to the Trump campaign.
Trump will have quite a bit to talk about at this rally, and he will likely mock MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who revealed on her show on Tuesday two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax return. However, this showed very little other than the fact that Trump made a lot of money in 2005 and paid the taxes that were legally required of him. On Wednesday morning, Trump attacked the reporter who obtained his tax returns, David Cay Johnston, suggesting that he didn’t actually receive it in his mailbox like he said.
Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, “went to his mailbox” and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!
Trump will also likely defend his party’s health care bill, a bill that Trump has thrown his support behind but that has struggled to gain support among House and Senate Republicans. Repealing and replacing Obamacare was one of the major promises of Trump’s campaign, so it should be interesting to see at this Nashville rally how Trump’s supporters feel about the American Health Care Act.