President Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally Thursday, Oct. 29, 2020, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

WASHINGTON (AP) — There are no crowds at Disneyland, still shut down by the coronavirus. Fewer fans attended the World Series this year than at any time in the past century. Big concerts are canceled.

But it’s a different story in Trumpland. Thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters regularly cram together at campaign rallies around the country — masks optional and social distancing frowned upon.

Trump rallies are among the nation’s biggest events being held in defiance of crowd restrictions designed to stop the virus from spreading. This at a time when public health experts are advising people to think twice even about inviting many guests for Thanksgiving dinner.

“It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, when you have congregate settings where people are crowded together and virtually no one is wearing a mask, that’s a perfect setup to have an outbreak of acquisition and transmissibility,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, recently told Yahoo News. “It’s a public health and scientific fact.”

The Trump campaign, which distributes masks and hand sanitizer at its rallies, says those who attend are peaceful protesters who, just like Black Lives Matter demonstrators, have a right to assemble. The Republican president says he wants to get the country back to normal.

Some states have fined venues that host Trump rallies for violating caps on crowd size. But the rallies continue — even as the U.S. sees cases spike, especially in the Midwest and the Plains. The nation posted a record high number of new infections last week — nearly 500,000.

The issue boiled over this week in Minnesota. The Trump campaign moved the president’s rally Friday from Rochester to a small town in another county, and then back to Rochester after state officials insisted that the event follow coronavirus safety guidelines, including a cap of 250 attendees. The campaign said “thanks to the free speech-stifling dictates” of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, “only the first 250 people will be admitted.”

Walz earlier said he was “deeply disappointed” to learn that compliance with the state’s masking and social distancing guidance was poor at Vice President Mike Pence’s rally Monday in the city of Hibbing.