HE might be 74 and probably still recovering from Covid-19 but there’s no denying the stamina, or desperation, of President Donald Trump.

His campaign team announced yesterday that the Republican Party candidate plans to hold 14 campaign rallies in three days beginning today and winding up on Monday evening before the election on Tuesday.

Yet the very fact that he is holding so many rallies could be counting against him as a new poll out yesterday showed that nearly 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump holding rallies during the pandemic.

The survey by USA Today/Suffolk University also showed that 64% approved of the decision by Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden not to hold such major rallies – his campaigns meetings have been of the “drive-in” variety.

Biden is ahead in the opinion polls nationally but many of the so-called swing states, which will determine the outcome of Tuesday’s election, are too close to call. Trump is making one final attempt over the weekend and on Monday to try and win the vote in those states that he realistically must capture if he is to stay in the White House.

Trump will hold rallies in no fewer than four Pennsylvania towns today. Tomorrow he will have rallies in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, and on Monday he will be back again in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and twice in Michigan, as well as in Wisconsin.

Trump trails Biden by about 7.8 percentage points on average in national polls, according to RealClearPolitics, but the race is much tighter and in some cases effectively tied because of the possible margin of error in polls in the states that Trump is targeting with his final weekend of rallies.

The reason why Trump is returning to his favourite campaign trail of rally after rally is nothing to do with them earning him new votes – they are uniformly attended by his existing supporters – but because his opponent is vastly outspending him on television advertising which experts in the USA say may be turning matters Biden’s way.

According to Bloomberg News, Biden is blanketing the airwaves in battleground states with television ads.

Yet it is his bold decision not to hold large campaign events because of the coronavirus pandemic that has earned the plaudits of many medical experts and a large proportion of the population just as US infection and death rates soar – there was a new daily record of 90,000 new cases recorded on Thursday.

As Biden intended, the public is taking an evermore jaundiced view of Trump’s handling of Covid-19.

Bloomberg News adds that Trump has also faced strong “criticism from state and local officials and public health authorities for gathering thousands of his supporters to the rallies, largely without any public health precautions.”

It has been noticeable, however, that more and more of Trump’s supporters attend the rallies with masks on whereas very few did so before the President himself caught the virus.