Trump campaign forced to pay North Carolina city $82k in advance for rally

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign was forced to pay more than $82,000 in advance for this week’s rally in Asheville, North Carolina.

Trump is set to take the stage at Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium on Wednesday after paying $82,247.60 to the city for a “last-minute” rally, according to Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR). The campaign, struggling to effectively blunt the momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris, reportedly first contacted the city about the rally on August 8.

City of Asheville spokesperson Kim Miller told BPR that $22,500 of the amount paid is a two-day rental fee for the auditorium, while “the remainder of the funds go to cover additional costs such as house support, production staff, production equipment rental, and exterior items like queue stanchions and port-a-loos.”

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.

Newsweek reached out for comment to the Trump campaign via email on Tuesday.

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.

Trump has long been fixated on the size of his rally crowds, boasting about attendance numbers—which were artificially inflated—on more than on occasion. Well-attended rallies for Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have seemingly prompted the former president to become particularly sensitive about the issue recently.

During a news conference at Mar-a-Lago last week, Trump falsely claimed to have held a rally with 100,000 spectators, while also complaining about the press going “crazy” for reporting on high attendance figures at Harris rallies.

In a recent Truth Social post, the former president also pushed a false conspiracy theory that claims images of a Harris rally used artificial intelligence to generate large crowds that “didn’t exist,” pointing to an event last week in Michigan that drew an estimated 15,000 Harris supporters.

Trump campaigning in North Carolina is likely part of an effort to secure victory in a state that has voted solidly Republican in presidential elections since the 1980s, with the lone exception being former President Barack Obama winning the state by a tiny margin in 2008.

But President Joe Biden lost to Trump in North Carolina by less than 100,000 votes in 2020 and a poll released this week shows that Harris is now tied with the former president in The Tar Heel State.