On January 29 2020, the Facebook page “The Other 98%” shared the following set of images, which were purportedly taken after United States President Donald Trump held a re-election campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey:
Text over four images of discarded trash, chairs, and plastic barriers read:
Trump held a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey last night and look how his selfish supporters trashed everything in sight. What a perfect metaphor for what these people are doing to our country.
“The Other 98%” didn’t include a source for the photographs, and reference to “yesterday” seemed to indicate January 28 2020. Per the President’s Twitter timeline, he did host a rally in Wildwood on January 28 2020:
As for the images, NJ.com published similar (but not identical) photographs in a January 29 2020 article about the post-rally cleanup efforts:
The thousands of people who descended upon the Jersey Shore town for President Donald Trump’s ‘Keep America Great’ rally at the Wildwoods Convention Center left behind a sea of trash in the parking lot — including their abandoned beach chairs and blankets — after the rally wrapped up.
Rally-goers were allowed to bring chairs as they waited in line — some for up to 48 hours before the event — but they weren’t allowed to bring them inside the venue.
Factor in the blankets they used to stay warm, and all their drinks and food they were snacking on during the long wait in the parking lot and the convention center ends up with a parking lot full of trash to deal with [the next] morning.
The Courier Post reported that Wildwood’s mayor had requested that the jurisdiction be reimbursed for the costs of cleaning up the rally mess:
Items prohibited inside the 7,500-seat hall remained on the venue’s grounds until either snatched up by scavengers or trashed by city public works [on January 29 2020], according to Mayor Pete Byron.
“We knew it was going to be a mess. We just didn’t know to what degree,” Byron told the Courier Post [the following morning].
“The Other 98%” shared photographs labeled as a mess left by rally-goers after Donald Trump made an appearance in Wildwood, New Jersey on January 28 2020. The images were real and accurately labeled, as they were captured the day after the rally before cleanup occurred. We therefore rate this claim True.