WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Wisconsin next week in what is expected to be his first rally since his criminal trial began in New York this month.
Trump is scheduled to appear in Waukesha on Wednesday and plans to deliver remarks about 2 pm at the Waukesha County Expo Center, where he’ll “contrast the peace, prosperity and security of his first term with Joe Biden’s failed presidency,” his campaign said .
The planned rally is the first for Trump since the start of his hush money trial in Manhattan. The former president has spent most of the past two weeks in court, largely unable to campaign. He’s accused of falsifying business records during his 2016 campaign to conceal an affair.
He previously scheduled a rally in North Carolina this past weekend, but it was canceled due to stormy weather. His Wisconsin visit will fall on a Wednesday — the one day a week he is typically not required to be in court.
Trump plans to hold a rally in Freeland, Mich., later in the day.
The former president held his first Wisconsin rally of the election cycle earlier this month, when he stopped in Green Bay. There, he attacked President Joe Biden over his handling of the US-Mexico border — a key issue to his campaign.
“We’re going to end up with the largest deportation in America,” Trump told the crowd in Green Bay of his plans if reelected. “I’m here to declare Biden’s border bloodbath … ends the day I take office. I will end the carnage.”
On Wednesday, Trump is expected to again make the southern border a focal point. His campaign this week said Biden’s border policies have “caused a crisis, with illegal immigrants and criminals funneling deadly drugs into Wisconsin communities.”
Trump’s visit to Wisconsin comes as President Joe Biden and his campaign has flooded the state over the last five months. Biden and his surrogates have made eight stops in the swing state since the start of the year. Biden was in Madison April 8 to unveil a new student loan debt forgiveness plan.
Biden’s campaign on Wednesday attacked Trump as having “nothing to offer but resentment and division.”
“After spending the last few weeks dozing off and bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade, Donald Trump is visiting Waukesha next week in a desperate bid to do damage control on his record of ripping away women’s freedoms and encouraging thousands of rioters to try to violently overturn an election,” the Biden campaign said in a statement.
The recent visits will not be the last for either candidate.
Wisconsin is one of just a handful of states that will decide the next presidential contest, and Biden and Trump are locked in a tight rematch of 2020. A Marquette University Law Poll released last week showed Trump leading Biden 51%-49% among both registered voters and likely voters.
Still, as Biden continues to campaign across the country, Trump has been in a Manhattan courtroom. And his trial could take several weeks.
“I should be in Georgia now. I should be Florida now,” Trump said ahead of one recent court appearance. “I should be a lot of different places right now campaigning, and I’m sitting here. And this will go on for a long time.”
