CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — President Donald Trump arrives in Ohio’s first capital city Wednesday for a “Midterm Rally” at Ohio University Chillicothe’s Shoemaker Center, the third Ohio stop of a cross-country blitz aimed at holding the Senate for Republicans six days before Election Day.
Doors open at 3:30 p.m. and the program begins at 5:30 p.m., with the president expected to take the stage around 7 p.m. Admission is free, but tickets through the Republican National Committee’s events page are required. The rally is hosted by the Trump 47 Committee, a joint fundraising committee supporting Republican candidates, and U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, who is running against Democrat Sherrod Brown, is scheduled to speak. It was not immediately clear whether gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who joined Trump at his earlier Ohio stops, would appear.
The visit caps a stretch of near-daily rallies. Trump spoke Saturday at the Guardian Centers in Perry, Georgia, then rallied Sunday at McMorran Place in Port Huron, Michigan, for Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, where rapper Nicki Minaj stepped off Air Force One with him. On Tuesday he held two rallies in Texas, one at the Port of Corpus Christi and an evening stop at the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center, as Attorney General Ken Paxton battles Democrat James Talarico for a Senate seat.
The pace does not slow after Chillicothe. Trump is scheduled in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on Thursday, with stops in Daytona Beach, Florida, on Friday and Salina, Kansas, on Saturday, and a rally in Iowa on Sunday.
Ohio has drawn outsized attention. Trump appeared in Vandalia on Oct. 3 and at Youngstown’s Covelli Centre on Oct. 12, both times alongside Husted and Ramaswamy. Husted, appointed to fill Vice President JD Vance’s former seat, faces Brown in a race national forecasters rate a toss-up, and more than $400 million has been spent or reserved on advertising in the contest, according to Axios. Sen. Bernie Moreno has called Ross County “the center of gravity” for the Republican Party.
Signs of a presidential arrival
Chillicothe got an early preview Monday, when white-topped U.S. Marine Corps helicopters — the aircraft designated Marine One when the president is aboard — were observed practicing landings in the city. The president is believed to be flying Air Force One into the Columbus area and taking Marine One the roughly 45 miles south to Chillicothe. The White House has not released details of the president’s travel.
The Shoemaker Center, at 101 University Drive on the campus off U.S. 23, is the largest indoor venue in Ross County. It features a full-length basketball court and bleacher seating for approximately 2,400 spectators, and was dedicated in 1979 in honor of Myrl Shoemaker, who served 24 years in the Ohio House and as lieutenant governor from 1982 until his death in 1985. The campus, founded in 1946, was Ohio University’s first regional campus.
The Chillicothe Ross Chamber of Commerce warned businesses this week to expect heavy traffic and road closures, and postponed its own “Puttin’ on the Ritz” event by a week because of the security restrictions.
Counter-programming from Democrats, PETA
Trump’s opponents plan to be heard before he lands. The Ohio Democratic Party has scheduled a 1 p.m. news conference in front of the Chillicothe Police Department at 28 N. Paint St., where Mayor Luke Feeney and former employees of the shuttered Pixelle paper mill will criticize Husted over what the party calls broken promises to mill workers and rising costs for families.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says a costumed “dinosaur” will greet the motorcade near the Shoemaker Center at 6:30 p.m. with a banner urging the president to end federally funded experiments on monkeys and dogs. “PETA calls on President Trump to direct NIH to stop bankrolling cruel and futile experiments on monkeys and dogs immediately,” Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo said in a statement. The group said the exact location of its demonstration would depend on security restrictions.
A rare stop for a sitting president
Wednesday’s rally is believed to be the first by a sitting president in Chillicothe in more than two decades. George W. Bush closed an Ohio bus tour with a Victory 2004 rally at the Ross County Fairgrounds on Sept. 10, 2004, telling the crowd he was there “to ask for the vote.” Trump’s 2020 campaign swing through the region took him to the Pickaway County fairgrounds in neighboring Circleville, about 20 miles north.
Before Bush, Bill Clinton spent the night in Chillicothe on Feb. 18, 1993, and the next morning — the day after his first address to Congress — held a town meeting on his economic plan in the Chillicothe High School gymnasium, one of the first major events of his presidency. Clinton returned several times, including stops at the Carlisle Building, downtown shops and Ohio University Chillicothe. Barack Obama rallied at the Ross County Courthouse on Oct. 10, 2008, but as a candidate, not a president.
The tradition reaches back more than two centuries. James Monroe, in 1817, became the first president to visit, stopping in Chillicothe on Aug. 28 of that year on a tour inspecting the nation’s western defenses, the year after the city gave up the capital for good. Harry Truman greeted a crowd from the rear platform of his train at the Chillicothe station on July 5, 1948, en route to Missouri, months before his famous whistle-stop reelection campaign.
The Ross County Historical Society counts more than a dozen other presidents among the city’s visitors, some while in office, some as candidates or private citizens, and several during the whistle-stop era when crowds gathered at the station to hear a few words from the rear of a train. They include William Henry Harrison (president in 1841), Zachary Taylor (1849–50), Andrew Johnson (1865–69), Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77), Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–81), whose wife, Lucy Webb Hayes, was born in Chillicothe and whose family ties brought the couple back often, William McKinley (1897–1901), Theodore Roosevelt (1901–09), William Howard Taft (1909–13), Warren G. Harding (1921–23), Calvin Coolidge (1923–29), Herbert Hoover (1929–33), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–45), Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69) and Richard Nixon (1969–74), who was photographed in Chillicothe with his wife, Pat, and then-Ross County Sheriff Fred Heinzelman.
Chillicothe, population about 22,000, served as the state’s first capital when Ohio entered the Union in 1803. The city has spent much of the past two years absorbing the closure of the Pixelle mill, which left hundreds without work and has become a flashpoint in the Senate race.
Election Day is Nov. 3.
