Trump Nomination Speech to Be at White House or Gettysburg

U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday he will make his Republican presidential renomination acceptance speech from either the White House or at a Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. 

With the coronavirus pandemic unchecked in the U.S., neither Trump nor his Democratic opponent in the November 3 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, is planning to make a traditional nomination acceptance speech at either of their respective scaled-back conventions. 

Biden last week said he would make his August 20 nomination acceptance speech from his home state of Delaware rather than go to the convention site in the midwestern city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

Republicans are holding a limited gathering in Charlotte, North Carolina, starting August 24.  

Trump said in a Twitter comment he would announce soon whether he would make his August 27 renomination acceptance speech from the White House or Gettysburg. 

The national park at Gettysburg commemorates the scene of a decisive 1863 Union victory that ended Confederate General Robert E. Lee's second and most ambitious invasion of the North during the Civil War, the years-long fight over states' rights and slavery in the United States. 

Four months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln delivered what came to be known as the Gettysburg Address, honoring those killed there. He said that the fallen helped preserve U.S. liberty and that its “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”