Trump Cancels Major Speech and Other Campaign Events, Citing Last Week’s Louisiana Trip as a Reason

Odd…

Donald Trump has just canceled a major speech in which he was to deliver his new policy on immigration. That speech was slated for Thursday, but Trump has now also canceled fundraising events in Colorado, Nevada, and Oregon. Trump was to hold a rally and fundraiser in Portland next week on Wednesday, August 31, but has now canceled, citing his trip last week to Louisiana where he unloaded boxes for a photo-op for 49 seconds.

“Skepticism surrounded Trump’s initial announcement that he would raise funds in Oregon and Washington in late August.  The two states haven’t voted for a Republican presidential nominee since President Ronald Reagan in 1984,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reports.

Canceling these fundraisers and rallies is an extremely unusual move, even for the Trump campaign, and it has pundits and the press wondering why:

Huffington Post’s Sam Stein:

The Daily Beast:

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall offers this insight:

“It’s not too much to say that mass expulsion and the the Taj MaWall constituted the crux of Trump’s campaign. Everything else kind of fed out from those two policies or were atmospherics surrounding it,” Marshall writes. And, this:

Would Trump himself flip on something so basic to his message? My sense is that Trump has fairly deep hates and grievances and feelings in the moment but doesn’t really believe much of anything. His principles are self-interest and opportunity. If he could pull it off it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see him just forget about the immigrant expulsion. You have to be familiar with a certain kind of sales person to get this. It was just a sales line. Deport them all; deport some; deport none but make them wear signs that say “kick me”. Whatever. I don’t think Trump has any deep ideological commitment to any of this, though I think he feels it deeply when he says it.

I suspect strongly that the campaign abruptly canceled this speech because they realized that they haven’t come up with a way yet to do the impossible: jettison the core message of his campaign without appearing to do so. So they’ll keep trying.

So is Trump going to reinvent his campaign, and lose his base? Or will they not care once again they’ve been lied to from the start?

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license