Politico: “It is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare: giving his acceptance speech in front of a half-empty arena, facing an audience whose faces are covered in masks, muffling their cheers and chants.”
“But it is exactly what he may be facing if last month’s edict from authorities in Jacksonville, Florida, mandating masks for all indoor gatherings remains in effect through late August. There is a special twist to this ruling: The Republicans had moved their convention out of Charlotte, North Carolina—a city that had put safety rules in place about public gatherings—just so the president could get the kind of crowd he wanted.”
“As of now, the planned Jacksonville convention looks like another blow to Trump’s insatiable hunger for crowds. His campaign kickoff last month in Tulsa, Oklahoma, turned from a potentially thrilling launchpad to an embarrassment when the campaign claimed it had had more than a million ticket requests, and the president ended up speaking to whole empty sections of a 19,000-seat arena. So fearful was his entourage about the prospect of empty seats, according to press reports, that they went through the arena, removing social distancing signs, hoping for a crowd jammed together, in direct violation of the arena’s policy.”