Former President Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally in Lehigh County on April 13, the same day he will appear at a Bucks County fundraiser, his campaign said in a release on Friday. He’ll speak at the Schnecksville Fire Hall in North Whitehall Township, the campaign said, with an event set to get underway at 7 p.m.
Trump is scheduled to appear that day at a fundraiser in Newtown, the Inquirer reported, hosted by prominent GOP donors. Tickets for that event start at $2,500 per person.
This will be his third visit of 2024 to Pennsylvania, considered a must-win swing state for Trump and President Joe Biden. Trump spoke at a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg in February, where he promised the audience “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” if he was elected. A week later, he unveiled a new line of Trump-branded sneakers in a surprise appearance at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia.
Biden has visited Pennsylvania four times in 2024, most recently in a campaign stop in Delaware County the day after his State of the Union address. Neither candidate has made his way to the western half of the Keystone State.
Biden beat Trump in Lehigh County in the 2020 election by 14,000 votes, and in Bucks County by just over 17,000 votes. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, but Biden flipped the state blue in 2020, winning by just over 80,000 votes. Late last month, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party opened coordinated campaign offices across the commonwealth, including three in Bucks County, as well as in traditionally “red” counties like Lancaster and York.
The offices will be focused on electing and reelecting Democrats “up and down the ballot,” including Biden and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who’s facing a tough reelection campaign against Republican David McCormick, who has significant personal wealth. It is not clear how many offices the Trump campaign has in the Keystone State, with the April 23 primary a few weeks away.
“Donald Trump spent four years pushing an extreme agenda that was devastating for Pennsylvania and the Lehigh Valley,” Biden-Harris 2024 Pennsylvania Communications Director Jack Doyle said in a statement Friday. “The Commonwealth lost thousands of jobs on his watch as he gave tax breaks to his ultra-wealthy friends at the expense of middle-class families, and now he’s bragging about his plans to ban abortion nationwide and rip health care away from millions. Trump would be better off continuing to hide out in Mar-a-Lago than coming face to face with the Pennsylvania voters he’s repeatedly failed.”
Update: This story was updated at 5:30 p.m. April 5, 2024 with a statement from the Biden campaign.