ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Donald Trump will get another chance Wednesday to recalibrate his presidential comeback, this time with a rally and speech in North Carolina that his campaign is describing as a major economic speech.
The event, set in a Democratic city surrounded by mountainous counties where Republicans hold a strong majority, has both national and local implications for the former president.
Republicans have expected Trump to direct his haphazard arguments and attacks at Vice President Kamala Harris since Democrats named her the presidential nominee. Twice in the past week, Trump has squandered such an opportunity, first during an hour-long press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and then in a 2 1/2-hour conversation on the social media platform X with CEO Elon Musk.
The latest effort comes in the state that delivered Trump’s closest statewide victory four years ago and is expected to be a battleground again in 2024. Trump defeated Democrat Joe Biden in North Carolina by less than 1.4 percentage points — about 74,500 votes — in 2020 and can ill afford to see the state’s 16 electoral votes shift to the Democrats for the first time since Barack Obama won here in 2008.
“We look forward to welcoming President Trump to Western North Carolina and talking about how he will restore our economy,” said Jason Simmons, chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party. “This visit shows that Republicans understand that North Carolina is bigger than Charlotte and Raleigh — beyond I-77 and I-95 — and that these communities are important here.”
The question, of course, is whether Trump can stick to a strict economic framework rather than falling back on his usual whining and elaborate grievances.
Trump has certainly attacked Harris, and Biden before her, on the economy. But he has done so mostly with hyperbole, with exhortations about a “Kamala crash … like 1929” and other sweeping generalizations, such as warnings about “World War III” and American suburbs “overrun by violent foreign gangs.” Trump has made almost literal claims about Biden’s potential election in 2020.
Trump has claimed in recent weeks that there “would have been no inflation” if he had been re-elected, ignoring the global supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the surge in COVID-19 spending, including a massive relief package Trump signed as president, and the global effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The former president has also promised an immediate fix for higher prices in a future term. His key policy proposals on that front include increased oil drilling (U.S. production has reached its highest level ever under Biden), new tariffs on foreign imports and an extension of his 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire under the next administration.
But at Mar-a-Lago, in his conversation with Musk, on his own Truth Social platform, and in his most recent rallies and other interviews, Trump has overshadowed his own economic agenda. He has become fixated on personally attacking Harris, falsely accusing her of misrepresenting her own race and ethnicity. He has revisited old attacks on Biden, repeating the lie that his 2020 defeat was due to systemic voter fraud. Recently, he has taken to lashing out at the size and enthusiasm of the crowds Harris draws on the campaign trail, even falsely claiming that a photo of her rally was fabricated using AI.
Those factors make it difficult for Trump to create a clearer policy contrast with the Democratic candidacy, no matter how much his advisers push for such a rethink.
In announcing his speech, Trump’s campaign listed the effects inflation has had on North Carolina since Biden’s 2021 inauguration. The campaign did the same ahead of Trump’s Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta. Trump even read the stats from the teleprompter — but only toward the end of his 91 minutes on stage and long after several thousand of the once-capacity crowd had left.
North Carolina, meanwhile, is another battleground state, with Trump pitted against Harris’s recently bold campaign in a terrain that had previously seemed to lean Republican, with Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Harris’ campaign has more than 20 offices and more than 170 staffers across North Carolina. Since the vice president became the presumptive nominee, nearly 12,000 new volunteers have signed up, the campaign said; more than 9,500 have volunteered in some capacity during that same time period, with nearly 90 percent of those volunteers doing so for the first time.
Matt Mercer, spokesman for the state GOP, said there are more than a dozen “Trump Force 47” offices in North Carolina, with more than a dozen paid staffers working to expand the volunteer base of “Trump Force 47 Captains” in the state.
Asheville and its environs will be the deciding factor in the outcome. Tucked against the Blue Ridge Mountains, the city has a liberal cultural identity with a bohemian feel and a live music and craft beer scene that attracts left-leaning students, retirees and tourists. But the surrounding western North Carolina mountain districts have become increasingly Republican in recent election cycles.
