President Donald Trump reportedly went rogue on Monday when he threatened to pull the Republican National Convention out of its planned venue in Charlotte, North Carolina if the state’s governor did not roll back the restrictions of his stay-at-home order that would hamper full attendance at the convention in August.
Unnamed sources told CNN on Tuesday that before Trump’s tweets on the issue, convention CEO Marcia Kelly and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had actually had cordial conversations with Gov. Roy Cooper (D) last week about the logistics of holding the convention amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
During Kelly’s call with Cooper, the CEO discussed strategies for in-person and virtual conventions. There reportedly had not been threatening demands made for a full convention.
RNC officials were thus taken by surprise when Trump fired off the tweets declaring that “we will be reluctantly forced to find, with all of the jobs and economic development it brings, another Republican National Convention site” if the North Carolina governor did not allow the convention to run as normal.
