For those of you not keeping score at home, that means Trump is hosting his first rally of the 2020 campaign just 29 days into his presidency.
The idea of a “permanent campaign” has been floating around American political circles since 1980, when Sidney Blumenthal used it as the title for a book. It was during the presidency of Bill Clinton, whom Blumenthal advised, that the idea really came into practice. Even by the standards of modern-day presidents, Clinton loved politicking, and his team held on to campaign methods once in the White House, famously calling on polling to help determine its course. Newt Gingrich helped Republicans capture the House in 1994, in part by adopting the same tactics. Each of Clinton’s successors has adopted the permanent-campaign mentality to some degree. [...]
Trump by contrast is planning a straightforward campaign-style rally on Saturday. It’s at an airport, in a swing state, and it’s being advertised through his campaign website. His press secretary even called it a campaign event. Making the event a campaign event rather than a speech might afford Trump greater flexibility in who he allows to attend and who he excludes. It means that the Trump campaign will likely pick up some of the travel tab, rather than taxpayers. But it might also grant Trump more leeway to make straightforwardly political arguments and attacks that it might be unseemly for a president to make at an official event—though Trump has shown such little regard for those unwritten rules that it’s hard to imagine he could be significantly more strident.
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