While the campaign paid in advance due to Asheville's policy for short-notice bookings, Trump has a long history of failing to pay cities for billed rally fees, leaving the White House in January 2021 with at least $850,000 in unpaid rally debt. Most of the bills are still unpaid, including more than $500,000 owed to The city of El Paso, Texas.
The Trump campaign booked the smaller of two venues at the same complex in downtown Asheville for Wednesday's rally. The Thomas Wolfe Auditorium has a capacity of just 2,431 people, while a larger arena next door that is not hosting Trump has a capacity of 7,200.
Smaller venues look more full and televised it’s easy to lie about crowd size. Folks pointed out empty seats at a prior rally so I’m sure that’s why the decision was made.
Now we can make fun of him for picking an arena 1/3 the size and point out even he knows his numbers are bunk. Bonus points of we still get empty seats.
Trump has a long history of failing to pay cities for billed rally fees, leaving the White House in January 2021 with at least $850,000 in unpaid rally debt.
Wait, what? Why would the White House inherit Trump's rally debt? Doesn't that belong to his campaign?
Isn't it a federal crime to use taxpayer money to fund your reelection campaign?
I put the following paragraph from the article in the summary for the original post:
While the campaign paid in advance due to Asheville's policy for short-notice bookings, Trump has a long history of failing to paycities for billed rally fees, leaving the White House in January 2021 with at least $850,000 in unpaid rally debt. Most of the bills are still unpaid, including more than $500,000 owed to the city of El Paso, Texas.
It seems some Lemmy clients don’t show the summary of cross posts.
Glad this is the top comment. I really dislike headlines like this. Why be manipulative when DJT is a seemingly bottomless well of actual things to be angry about?
It’s probably because it’s a city that has a large enough venue to host nearby rural folks who are his target demographic. If I had to guess, it will have low local attendance and the audience will largely be made up of people whining about Asheville and its residents.
This is how it was in my region of California last time he was here. Lots of folks from the surrounding sub regions but not many from the core areas, its not like the Inland Empire is some leftist stronghold its just locals dont care about that trite culturally so ya can only get more younger populations of yuppies and the like. Note younger in this context means your family located here sometime after the 70s, and if you are talking to an old bastard that timescale is pushed back to the before ww2.
Ah the liberal Asheville is smart enough to make him pay beforehand, but still not smart enough not to do business with a con man who wants to overthrow them