It’s likely little more than clickbait, but WDSU-TV in New Orleans carried a story from the AP yesterday which named New Orleans as one of six cities in contention to hold the newly-homeless Republican National Convention after President Trump yanked it from Charlotte in reaction to North Carolina governor Roy Cooper’s refusal to guarantee access to the convention facilities in light of the COVID-19 epidemic.

President Donald Trump says he is seeking a new state to host the Republican National Convention after North Carolina refused to guarantee the event could be held in Charlotte without restrictions because of ongoing concerns over the coronavirus.

Trump tweeted the news Tuesday night, complaining that the state’s governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, and other officials “refuse to guarantee that we can have use of the Spectrum Arena” and are not “allowing us to occupy the arena as originally anticipated and promised.”

Trump and the Republican National Committee had been demanding that the convention be allowed to move forward with a full crowd and no face coverings.

According to a tweet by White House Correspondent Francesca Chambers, New Orleans is one of six cities under consideration to host the event.

RNC official tells me the cities that are being seriously considered for the celebration night of the GOP convention are:

Jacksonville
Orlando
New Orleans
Nashville
Dallas
Phoenix

Others cities are also under discussion but those are the ones the RNC is setting up tours of.

— Francesca Chambers (@fran_chambers) June 3, 2020

Yeah, OK.

You can say you heard it here first – New Orleans is not hosting the Republican convention.

What’s really going on is that New Orleans operatives who are on the outs with that city’s lunatic leadership are using the free agency of the convention as an opportunity to make Karen Carter Peterson and LaToya Cantrell look bad.

Cantrell, after all, has canceled every event in New Orleans of any size through the end of the year. That would include the Republican Convention in August, obviously. So presenting the convention, which would be a godsend for the city’s newly-destitute hotels and restaurants, as a possibility would make Cantrell look doubly a villain – especially when she’s keeping all those businesses closed and refusing to go to a Phase 2 reopening while at the same time giving a wink and a nod to “peaceful” protesters so obnoxious that they’ve decided to occupy I-10 in the downtown area.

Last night the wages of such stupidity were paid when Cantrell’s protester friends demanded to be allowed onto the Crescent City Connection. They also demanded the New Orleans Police Department officers sent to practice crowd control lay down their weapons and leave their vehicles, and that’s when the NOPD, which has been so solicitous of the protesters this week that they’ve sent tweets congratulating them for not rioting and even kneeled before the protesters as they occupied an I-10 overpass near the Vieux Carre exit, decided they’d had enough. Tear gas was used and the protests broken up; now, Cantrell’s friends vow they’ll resume their operations this afternoon on the West Bank in Jefferson Parish. That isn’t likely to go well at all should it turn unruly, because the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department is sure to be a lot less solicitous of the Antifa/Black Lives Matter mob.

Under those circumstances, and given the recent wave-making move by Cantrell’s ally Karen Carter Peterson, who used her state senate seat to block the nomination of former House speaker pro tem Walt Leger, a white New Orleans Democrat, to the chairmanship of the New Orleans Convention Center board, the Republican convention is little more than a chess piece to make Peterson and Cantrell look bad.

So no – the convention isn’t coming to New Orleans. It’ll be in one of those other cities, where the leadership isn’t as insane and incompetent as what the Big Easy is saddled with.