OCALA, Fla. – For the second time this week, President Donald Trump will hold a rally in Central Florida, this time in Ocala.
The rally ahead of the Nov. 3 election will be held Friday at Ocala International Airport, just four days after the president visited Sanford.
Doors open at 1 p.m. for the Make America Great Again rally, with Trump expected to speak around 4 p.m.
At the Sanford rally, Trump turned his first campaign rally since contracting COVID-19 into a full-throated defense of his handling of the pandemic that has killed 215,000 Americans, joking that he was healthy enough to plunge into the crowd and give voters “a big fat kiss.”
There was no social distancing and mask-wearing was spotty among the thousands who came to see Trump’s return to Florida. He held forth for an hour, trying to get his campaign back on track with just weeks left before Election Day.
Though he was hospitalized battling the virus only a week ago, Trump’s message on COVID-19 was unaltered since his diagnosis: a dubious assessment that the pandemic was just about a thing of the past. Hundreds of people in the U.S. continue to die of the virus every day.
“Under my leadership, we’re delivering a safe vaccine and a rapid recovery like no one can even believe,” Trump insisted. “If you look at our upward path, no country in the world has recovered the way we have recovered.”
Trump’s Sanford rally was his first stop in a busy week that will include events in Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Wisconsin.