During an MSNBC panel discussion on tomorrow’s New Hampshire GOP primary, MSNBC contributor John Heilemann made a rather astute observation when he pointed out that Donald Trump’s has seemingly been struggling to fill arena seats with MAGA bodies in the Granite State, leading the former POTUS and 2024 Republican candidate to utilize smaller and smaller venues across the state, in what Heilemann believes is an effort to avoid the optics of all those “empty seats.”
Speaking on the recent panel with hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, Heilemann pointed out that the scandal-plagued ex-president’s rallies and campaign events just do not have the same energy nor attendance that they once did.
“I mean, look, Joe, you mentioned that event,” the MSNBC contributor began. “I was thinking about you on Saturday night. It’s the SNHU Arena across the street from where I am now. It’s a big sports arena, they do hockey games and basketball games stuff there. We were there together four years ago, Willie [Geist], you, me, [Mike] Barnicle. We were all out there, there was a huge snowstorm. It seats 10,000 people and it was packed to the gills in 2016. The other night here, there were empty seats all over the arena.”
“They said there were a few thousand people there, and there probably were a few thousand, but that seats 10,000; it was way less than half filled, and even in the lower level, you could see just seat after seat after seat with no one in it,” Heilemann added before noting that Trump seems to be shifting to much smaller venues so there aren’t so many empty seats to make him look bad. “Last night, you know, he did an event on Sunday night in Rochester: the place as a capacity of 700. I mean he filled 700 seats, but, you know, Trump used to brag about the 10,000 people, 12,000 people. ‘We kept 10,000 people outside, as far as the eye can see.'”
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“He is getting more people to turn out than Nikki Haley, but the phenomenon, the energy of Donald Trump that you saw on the ground here, that we saw on the ground here in 2016, to a lesser extent in 2020, partly because of the pandemic, it’s ebbed a great deal in this primary,” he said.
It certainly seems that Trump’s trouble and scandal are starting to catch up with him where it hurts.
Watch the MSNBC discussion here:
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
