Senator Jon Ossoff has claimed President Trump is pulling back from rallies because he fears playing to empty rooms. On MS NOW's The Briefing with Jen Psaki on Thursday night, the Georgia Democrat said of the cancelled appearances: "I imagine they are canceling these to avoid the humiliation of empty seats and small crowds." In the same interview he went further: "Trump is a weak, failed, disgraced president who is probably canceling these rallies to avoid the humiliation of empty seats and small crowds," and he mocked the White House staff as "mostly doing child care... having to coddle the toddler president who is staring at imminent rebuke of historic magnitude."
The record is narrower than the claim. What Trump actually cancelled on Thursday was two weekend in-person rallies — Salina, Kansas on Saturday and Dubuque, Iowa on Sunday — replacing them with a "72-hour sprint" of roughly 20 tele-rallies. He had headlined 25 rallies in October across 19 states, rallied in Rock Hill, South Carolina on Thursday itself, hosted freed American Stephen Hubbard in the Oval Office on Friday, and was due in Daytona Beach the same day. The RNC said Republicans were in a strong position in the cancelled states, and Trump said Kansas Senator Roger Marshall was "doing very well." Ossoff, who had rallied with Barack Obama the night before and with Kamala Harris that day, suggested Republican candidates did not want Trump in their states at all.
Then, on Friday, the White House reversed the cancellations altogether: "Rallies are BACK ON!" — Kansas and Iowa were both restored for Sunday, November 1, on top of the tele-rallies. Trump had already pushed back himself, boasting on Truth Social about record midterm crowds and attacking the reporter who asked him about the cancellations. So the weekend Ossoff described as a retreat from empty seats ends, on the current schedule, with the president back on stage in both states the day after tomorrow.
For voters, the exchange is a measure of where the midterm fight now runs: not over whether the president can still draw a crowd — Sunday's rooms in Kansas and Iowa will show that either way — but over which side's reading of his strength the country believes four days before it votes. Ossoff, who is himself on Georgia's ballot Tuesday, has bet on decline. The White House has answered by putting the rallies back on.
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