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By James Bickerton
News Reporter
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Donald Trump told reporters on Thursday that he has held relatively few public campaign events over the past few weeks as he is "leading by a lot," wants to wait for the Democratic National Convention to finish on August 22 and is doing lots of radio and television interviews.
The Republican presidential candidate offered the explanation during a press conference he hosted at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Thus far this month, Trump has only held one public rally, in Atlanta on August 3, though he is scheduled to attend another on Friday evening in Bozeman, Montana, which is being held to support a Republican Senate candidate.
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By contrast, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have held rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan this week and are due to hold further rallies on Friday in Arizona and Saturday in Nevada.
According to an analysis by CNBC News, Trump held 27 campaign rallies in August 2016, when he was first running for president, covering 15 states.
Addressing Trump during Thursday's press conference a journalist said: "You have not had a public campaign event for nearly a week now, tomorrow you'll be in Montana which is not a swing state, some of your allies have expressed concern that you're not taking this race seriously particularly at a time..."
At this point, Trump interrupted, commenting, "What a stupid question." But the journalist continued: "Where there is enthusiasm on the other side, why haven't you been campaigning this week?"
Trump replied: "Because I'm leading by a lot and because I'm letting their convention go through and I am campaigning a lot, I'm doing tremendous amounts of taping here—we have commercials at a level that I don't think anyone's ever done before.
"Plus in certain cases—I see many of you in the room where I'm speaking to you on phones, I'm speaking to radio, I'm speaking to television. Television's coming over here. Excuse me, what are we doing right now?"
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Referring to Harris, Trump continued: "She's not doing a news conference. Do you know why? Because she can't do a news conference. She doesn't know how to do a news conference, she's not smart enough to do a news conference, and, I'm sorry, we need smart people to lead this country because our country has never been in this danger before, both economically and from an outside perspective."
Trump later added that he was "going to certain places to help certain senators get elected" and claimed he would be doing this in states such as Wyoming and Montana which are widely regarded as solidly Republican for the presidential election.
Newsweek reached out to representatives for Harris and Trump's campaign for comment via email outside of regular office hours on Friday.
On July 13, Trump narrowly survived assassination when a gunman opened fire on a rally he was hosting near Butler, Pennsylvania. The former president was lightly injured on his ear, and one rally attendee was killed, as was the attacker via return fire from law enforcement.
More than a dozen polls conducted since Harris became the Democrats' presumptive presidential candidate after President Biden dropped out of the race have put her ahead of Trump. This week, Harris became the favorite to win the 2024 presidential contest with Betfair and Paddypower, two leading bookmakers.
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