President Trump is scheduled to visit Jupiter on Tuesday.
This marks one of his first opportunities to campaign in Florida since the nominating conventions. Trump plans to highlight his environmental record, according to the White House.
WLRN’s Alexander Gonzalez got the latest about the president’s South Florida stop from the Palm Beach Post’s politics editor Antonio Fins.
ALEXANDER GONZALEZ: What can we expect to hear from the president in Jupiter?
ANTONIO FINS: I expect that this will be the first campaign stop he makes in Florida, which is a state that is now in play. A lot of pollsters and political analysts thought that Florida would be a lock for Trump. He won it in 2016. It is now his adopted home state. And they figured that he would have a pretty easy run in Florida, where at least among Republicans, he’s incredibly popular.
GONZALEZ: Why do you think the president is speaking in Jupiter specifically?
North Palm Beach County, Stuart, Martin counties, that’s a pretty friendly audience for him. He's touting his environmental record. You would think that he'd be out there arguing more about the economy — something that polls show that it is the one area where the public tends to view Trump more favorably than rival Joe Biden.
The environment is probably on a lot of Floridians’ minds. What specifically about the president’s record will be brought up?
He will be met there by [Rep.] Brian Mast, a Republican congressman from the Stuart-Martin-northern Palm Beach County area. What they're going to be talking about is this Great American Outdoors Act that Mast played a role in getting passed to Congress. The president signed it early last month, and it is an opportunity to raise some money and create permanent funding streams for these two funds that already exist that deal with acquisition of lands and protection and maintenance of lands.
ICYMI → The House passed the Great American Outdoors Act this week to permanently authorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This is a monumental piece of legislation and a huge win for the Everglades! https://t.co/vgJQ7tDkPL— Rep. Brian Mast (@RepBrianMast) July 26, 2020
The issue that's going to be raised by Democrats is that they're going to cite that the Trump administration's rolled back environmental protections and has not been as protective of the environment in some of these sanctuaries and protected areas as the Trump campaign and the White House claim.
The other interesting sidelight will be the reporting in The Atlantic about the disparaging comments that the president has made about men and women who've lost their lives fighting to defend the country in foreign wars. He will be met by Mast, who is a wounded veteran. That's going to be an interesting juxtaposition of the president there with Mast in light of the controversy about what the Atlantic has reported.
The transcript of this interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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