NORTH CAROLINA — Nearly two months after pulling the Republican National Convention from Charlotte over a dispute about coronavirus restrictions, President Donald Trump now says he'll accept the presidential nomination in North Carolina after all.
Trump made the announcement Monday during a visit to a Morrisville, North Carolina, company manufacturing a COVID-19 vaccine. When asked by a WRAL reporter where he would make his acceptance speech, Trump said a final announcement about the exact location would be made by the end of this week or early next week.
"All I know is I'll be in North Carolina, and that's a very big deal because we'll have a lot of the delegates there and there will be a nomination process," he said. "That's essentially where the nomination is formalized, and I'm really honored to do it in North Carolina."
The venue change announcement is a complete about-face from the abrupt decision announced via Twitter in early June that canceled the event, nearly two years in the making, that was originally to begin in Charlotte Aug. 24. "Had long planned to have the Republican National Convention in Charlotte," Trump said at the time in a series of tweets. "Now, [Gov.] Roy Cooper and his representatives refuse to guarantee that we can have use of the Spectrum Arena — spend millions of dollars, have everybody arrive, and then tell them they will not be able to gain entry," he said.
As early as May, Trump threatened to pull the Republican National Convention if the state couldn't guarantee "full attendance" at the event. He doubled down on the threat in June, saying Cooper had a week to make assurances that the RNC event could go forward without implementing requirements for face coverings, crowd limitations or social distancing as the state continued to see a rise in the number of COVID-19 cases.
As North Carolina continued to battle community spread of the virus, it was a demand to which Cooper was unwilling to yield. "We have been committed to a safe RNC convention in North Carolina, and it's unfortunate they never agreed to scale down and make changes to keep people safe," Cooper said in a response to Trump at the time. "Protecting public health and safety during this pandemic is a priority."
The RNC was to be moved to an arena in Jacksonville, Florida. However, those plans were scrapped last week due to a coronavirus surge in that state.
North Carolina public health officials' concerns about the impact of a large-scale indoor event on community spread of COVID-19 were recently realized in Tulsa following a late-June Trump rally in the 19,000-seat BOK Center arena. The event drew about 6,200 attendees; few safety protocols, such as face masks and social distancing, were followed. By early July, local health officials said the rally "likely contributed" to a surge of almost 500 new COVID-19 cases in Tulsa County, The Associated Press reported.
As of Monday, North Carolina reported 114,338 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19, and 1,790 deaths.
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