Speculation is building in Mobile political circles that President Donald Trump could return to Ladd-Peebles Stadium in the coming weeks to headline a rally for U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Tuberville, though as of now the talk remains unconfirmed. Staff at Ladd-Peebles Stadium said this week they have received no official notice of any such event, and no campaign or White House official has publicly confirmed a visit.
Still, the possibility has generated buzz among local political observers, in part because of the historical weight the aging stadium carries in Alabama Republican politics. It was at Ladd-Peebles in August 2015 that Trump, then a long-shot presidential candidate, drew a massive crowd for one of the signature rallies of his early campaign. That night is remembered less for the size of the crowd than for a single moment on stage: then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Mobile stepped out, donned a “Make America Great Again” hat and became the first sitting senator in the country to endorse Trump’s candidacy.
The Trump-Sessions alliance forged that night helped propel Trump’s outsider campaign toward legitimacy with the Republican base and, after Trump’s election, into the West Wing, where Sessions was tapped to serve as U.S. Attorney General. The partnership soured dramatically after Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, a decision Trump has repeatedly and publicly criticized in the years since. Trump ultimately forced Sessions out of the administration, and the two have traded public jabs ever since.
That history is what makes the prospect of a Ladd-Peebles rally for Tuberville so notable to political watchers. Sessions, who represented Alabama in the Senate for two decades before joining the Trump administration, is now trying to reclaim his old seat and faces Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach, in the Republican runoff. Trump has already thrown his support behind Tuberville and used social media to needle his former attorney general throughout the race. A rally in Mobile, in the same stadium where the Trump-Sessions relationship began, would add a pointed layer of political theater to that rivalry and hand Tuberville a marquee campaign moment in front of a hometown crowd that once cheered for Sessions.
Details of the 2015 event have become part of local political lore. Trump arrived at the stadium aboard his private jet, drawing an overflow crowd that spilled into the parking lots well before his remarks began, and city work crews cleared several large trees from the Ladd-Peebles grounds in the days beforehand to make room for the press risers, security equipment and additional seating the event required. Trump’s speech that night ran long and wandered across a wide range of topics, but it is the roughly two minutes Sessions spent on stage in his MAGA hat that locals still bring up first.
Whether such a rally would meaningfully shift votes is an open question. Alabama Republican primary voters have not always followed Trump’s lead in statewide races. In the 2017 special Senate election, Trump endorsed then-Sen. Luther Strange, who had been appointed to the seat vacated by Sessions, only to see Strange lose the GOP primary to Roy Moore. Moore went on to lose the general election to Democrat Doug Jones in a race that shocked the state’s political establishment. This year, Moore’s own campaign for the Senate seat again fell far short in the Republican primary, finishing well behind both Sessions and Tuberville.
Ladd-Peebles Stadium has hosted large-scale political events before, and a Trump rally of the scale seen in 2015 would likely draw heavy local and national media attention, along with the traffic and security logistics that come with a presidential visit. City officials have not indicated any planning is underway for such an event, and stadium management said they would need substantially more lead time to prepare for a rally of that magnitude.
Sessions has largely avoided direct confrontation with Trump on the campaign trail, instead leaning on his decades of service to Alabama and his early role in building the state’s modern conservative movement. He has continued to point to his relationship with voters built over a long career in the Senate, even as Trump has used his platform to boost Tuberville’s candidacy.
Sessions himself has offered little public grievance about the prospect of his old ally returning to Mobile. Asked previously about Trump’s travel to the state, Sessions said simply, “It’s always a good day when the president of the United States visits Alabama,” a line that has circulated among local Republicans as evidence he intends to avoid engaging Trump directly on the trail no matter how pointed the president’s Twitter attacks become.
For now, the idea of a second Trump visit to Ladd-Peebles remains unconfirmed, and it is unclear whether the president’s schedule will bring him back to Mobile before Alabama voters decide the Republican Senate nomination. If it does happen, it would mark a striking return to the site where one of the most consequential endorsements of Trump’s early political career took place, five years and one bitter fallout later.