President-elect Donald Trump was set to take an Arizona victory lap Sunday morning, returning to a battleground state he won decisively last month on his way back to the White House.
Trump was slated to speak at AmericaFest, a conference put on by the Phoenix-based conservative groups Turning Point Action and Turning Point USA.
“We are incredibly honored that President Trump will deliver his first rally-style speech since the election at AmFest 2024 in Phoenix,” Turning Point President Charlie Kirk said in a written statement.
Trump’s remarks were set to begin at 10:30 a.m. at the Phoenix Convention Center and will be livestreamed on azcentral.com. The appearance comes less than a month before Trump is sworn in for a second term on Jan. 20.
Trump will appear on the last day of the four-day conservative gathering, which featured GOP stars such as his son, Donald Trump Jr., former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and incoming “border czar” Tom Homan, among others.
“When I spoke to the president, he said he’d only do it if we called it a ‘Tribute to Arizona,’ so that’s exactly what we’re doing. President Trump knows the people of Arizona have always been with him, loyal to him, and they just delivered the largest win for him of all of the swing states,” Kirk said.
Trump won Arizona by more than 5 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election. He’ll be the first president to serve nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland.
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Trump’s win in Arizona was a remarkable comeback after the 2020 election, when Trump narrowly lost his reelection bid here to President Joe Biden. Trump contested those election results for years, and one of Turning Point’s top staff was indicted for his alleged role in Arizona’s fake elector case.
The Sunday appearance comes as Trump wages the first policy battles of his second term, like the looming government shutdown and his upcoming Cabinet confirmation fights. Turning Point plastered banners around the convention hall that read “GIVE TRUMP HIS CABINET.”
During an earlier AmericaFest session on Thursday, Kirk celebrated the Trump and Musk effort to block a deal to avert a government shutdown for being too bloated. Kirk said Trump’s success in killing the deal was due in part to Turning Point’s conservative activists online. The bill is referred to as a continuing resolution or “CR.”
“You, everybody in this room and everyone watching online, you defeated the Washington insiders in hours,” Kirk said. “That CR is dead. It is dead.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Trump to speak in Phoenix today: What to know
