Trump to hold his first Waco rally since 1993 siege

WACO, Texas — Thirty years ago, federal agents were in the midst of the 51 day siege of a compound occupied by cult leader David Koresh and his anti-government followers. On April 19, 1993, the siege ended in a firefight after Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the FBI to raid the compound.

Today, former President Donald Trump, who has made a political art of ranting about government-run conspiracies to rob him of power and freedom, will hold his first major rally of the 2024 presidential election cycle.

Trump is surrounded by the prospect of indictments in Manhattan, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. over his alleged hush money payment to a pornstar, and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, along with the physical backdrop of this small city on the Brazos River.

Mary Trump, the former president's niece and vocal critic of his, wrote on Twitter that Donald Trump is going to have a rally in Waco this Saturday. It is a ploy to remind his cult of the infamous Waco siege of 1993, where an anti-government cult fought the FBI. There were scores of deaths. He wants to rescue him from justice because he wants the same violent chaos to happen. Trump has been railing against government officials who are investigating him, with increasingly dark warnings about what will happen if he is charged.

There are more traditional political reasons for Trump to choose Waco as the starting point for a new round of his trademark rallies, because it's easy to ignore the obvious spectacle of an anti-establishment candidate stoking thousands of supporters at the site of a showdown between federal agents and anti-government conspiracy theorists.

As he seeks the GOP nomination for the third time in a row, Trump and his team understand the importance of Texas in delivering delegates to the Republican National Convention. The state is second only to California in the number of seats available, and it will matter more to the final count than the first four early states - Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina - combined.

It is guaranteed to be a crowd for him and part of I think the success they can have in going to red states is part of the success, said a former Trump campaign aide. It is intimidating. It is a show of force. Here s 10, 15,000, whatever, people in a room and nobody else can do that. It fits in with his pattern of picking sites that are not major cities but accessible to them.

President Trump is holding his first campaign rally in Waco in the state of Texas on Tuesday because it is centrally located and close to all four of Texas' biggest metropolitan areas, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said. This is the perfect location to have as many supporters from across the state and neighboring states attend this historic rally.

Trump aides dismisses the possibility that a Waco rally would be held during the 30th anniversary of the siege, which might show sympathy to anti-government voters.

That sounds like stuff that people in New York or D.C. who have never been to Texas would say, said one Trump aide.