The seeming inevitability of Trump’s backtrack on his Jacksonville convention events

It was the sort of short-term outlook that has been a centerpiece of President Trump’s approach to the coronavirus.

The long-planned convention in Charlotte would be scaled downward, the Trump campaign announced June 11, in favor of holding a more boisterous speech from the president in the city of Jacksonville. The reason for the change was explicit: Charlotte’s mayor was mandating procedures aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus. Those procedures meant masks and physically separated convention attendees. Trump, who wanted a loud crowd there to cheer him on, rejected the idea.

At the time, Mecklenburg County, N.C., where Charlotte is located, was seeing an average of 188 new coronavirus cases a day. Duval County, Fla., home of Jacksonville, was seeing only 27. Jacksonville seemed like it had things well in hand; a few weeks prior, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) stood outside the White House to brag about how effective his state had been at controlling the virus’s spread.

But one had to wonder. If Jacksonville wasn’t implementing efforts to contain the virus, didn’t that increase the risk of an outbreak in the city? Wasn’t the safer long-term bet to go with the city that was trying to contain the virus in the moment, with the hope that it would be sufficiently contained by the time of the convention to actually allow for the sort of event Trump sought?