'I don't happen to agree': Trump White House aide opposes ex-president's latest move

Donald Trump insists he'll go forward with a visit to Springfield, Ohio, despite its mayor's plea to stay away after he put the city at the center of the presidential campaign with false claims about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets.

The former president and Republican nominee told rally goers Wednesday in New York that he intends to hold an event in the city that has been besieged by bomb threats since he and running mate J.D. Vance spread knowingly false allegations against legal immigrants living there, and Trump continued to malign Springfield in his pledge to visit.

“I’m going to go there in the next two weeks, I’m going to Springfield,” Trump told supporters in Uniondale, New York. “You may never see me again, but that’s okay – got to do what I got to do. ‘Whatever happened to Trump?’ ‘Well, he never got out of Springfield.’”

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Mike Dubke, who served as White House communications director in the first months of Trump's presidency, questioned his intent to visit the city over the mayor's objections.

"If I had to put my campaign hat on and look at why the Trump campaign is doing this," Dubke told CNN, "to your point about voters in different areas of the country, if your goal is to turn out low-propensity Trump voters and create an atmosphere where you can have something to talk about, because now we're how many days into this story? We are 10 days into the story. This is a perfect, this is a made-for-TV, made-for-social media story that goes back-and-forth. If that is your goal, rather than to convince undecided voters to come to your side, you want to turn out low-propensity base voters, that makes sense."

"I understand what they're trying to do here," he added. "I don't happen to agree with it because I think they've got a target-rich environment in the seven states that we care about talking about the economy, talking about immigration, talking about international crises."

Dubke questioned why Trump was even considering a campaign stop in Ohio, which he won in the last two elections and is expected to win again, instead of swing states he needs to be re-elected.

"I think it's in the president's DNA, president Trump's DNA to quadruple, quintuple down on things," Dubke said. "I think if they said, 'Please come to Springfield,' he would then go to Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Michigan, where I think the campaign would be better served, frankly. This reminds me of 2016 when you had Hillary Clinton at the end when she thought she was going to win the election, she didn't go to Wisconsin. You just had the former lieutenant governor [of Wisconsin] on talking about the fact that she lost the vote in Milwaukee and Trump won that, and won the White House. So campaigns, it is valuable to have their time there. He shouldn't be going to Ohio, but i think it's in his DNA."

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