After President Trump held a rally at a Nebraska airport Tuesday night, thousands of the president’s supporters were left stranded for hours in plummeting temperatures. Seven people were reportedly taken to area hospitals with hypothermia; their condition is unclear.
Trump had finished his remarks at Eppley Airfield and flown away on Air Force One, at which point the rally crowd, which numbered about 6,000 total, was meant to be bused back to parking lots ringing the base — at least one of which was almost four miles away. But the buses meant to transport them couldn’t get through clogged one-way roads, so thousands were left standing and waiting.
Groups of Trump supporters, many of them on the older side, huddled together as police ferried some back to parking lots. In the end, it took more than three hours for the scene to clear.
The Iowa Starting Line website reported that the event was poorly organized from the beginning, with enormous lines of cars directed in circles before the rally, confusing directions about where to finally park, and slow-moving lines to get into the rally itself.
Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, that splits its electoral votes rather than handing all of them to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide; this anomaly accounts for the fact that Trump was in a deep-red state a few days before the election. The president is seen by election analysts as a heavy underdog for one of the state’s electoral votes decided by voters in an area that encompasses Omaha.
