CHARLOTTESVILLE – President Trump will make his first visit to his son Eric’s Virginia vineyard since being re-elected Friday evening, for events connected with the political action committee known as MAGA, Inc.
According to his public schedule, the president will first meet with members of the PAC, which federal records show has amassed $312M in contributions as of February. That is to be followed by a roundtable dinner with MAGA, Inc. at the 1,300-acre Trump Winery in Charlottesville later in the evening. The president is expected to return to the White House Friday night.
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The dinner is expected to be held in the 26,000-square-foot, 45-room neo-Georgian mansion known as Albemarle Estate, once the private residence of John and Patricia Kluge. The vineyard is reported to be the largest in the Commonwealth and has been owned by Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC since the Trump family purchased it in 2011.
Charlottesville, once home to Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, has not had a sitting president visit since President Barack Obama toured Monticello in 2014.
The city was also the scene of a deadly crash in which a driver plowed into a crowd of anti-white nationalist protesters in August 2017. James Alex Felix was sentenced to life in prison in 2019 for that attack.
Separately, three members of a California-based white supremacist group were sentenced in 2019 for their part in that “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, in which members of the group carried torches as they marched through the campus of the University of Virginia, some chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
Still in his first term, President Trump declared at a news conference the violence in that 2017 clash between the groups should be “blamed on both sides,” and that there were “very fine people on both sides.”