Many Trump supporters, including a number of elderly fans, were stranded in the cold on Tuesday night for hours after attending a rally for President Donald Trump at an airport in Omaha, Nebraska.
Hours after President Trump took off on Air Force One, local police were rushing in to help the most vulnerable in the crowd get warm amid the icy temperature as they waited for a return bus to reach their cars, the Washington Post reported.
At least seven people were taken to hospitals, according to Omaha Scanner. Police did not provide reporters on the scene with an exact count of how many needed treatment, the Post said.
Aaron Sanderford, an Omaha World-Herald reporter, tweeted that the Trump campaign said it had provided enough buses but that the flow of traffic was delayed on the small, two-lane airport access road since it was limited to one direction that was more than three miles away from the parking lot where many supporters had left their cars.
While the President departed on Air Force One around 9 p.m., by the Post’s account, it was nearly 10:30 p.m., when many were still waiting in the freezing cold to board buses back to their cars.
Per Omaha Scanner, officers began reporting a number of cases of elderly people at-risk in the cold.
“President Trump took off in Air Force One 1 hr 20 minutes ago, but thousands of his supporters remain stranded on a dark road outside the rally,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny tweeted, noting that he also overheard a police officer saying at one point that another 30 buses were needed.
Soon, Police began shuttling some people to their cars to get them out of the elements.
It wasn’t until after midnight — more than three-and-a-half hours after Trump departed that the rally site was fully cleared of freezing fans, according to an account of the events in tweets by Sanderford.
During his speech, Trump repeated an apparent favorite false statement on the coronavirus pandemic, saying that “we’re making that final turn” on COVID-19 and that “normal life will fully resume.”
The comments came as COVID-19 cases have spiked in Nebraska with the state averaging more than 800 new cases daily for nine consecutive days, the World-Herald noted.
Though the campaign checked temperatures and offered masks, few were actually worn, the World-Herald reported.
