President Donald Trump's attempt to catch a second bolt of lightning in a Michigan-shaped bottle begins Thursday night with a campaign-style rally in Grand Rapids, a booming midwestern city of 200,000 in a state he was supposed to lose in 2016.

Red 'MAGA' hats were out in force on the streets, with an estimated 3,000 people lined up five hours before the president was expected to deliver a raucous victory lap that put the special counsel probe firmly in his rear-view mirror.

Some of his supporters said he has a chance to start the 2020 cycle with a clean slate.

'The campaign starts today,' said Mary Warner, a sixty-something mother of two who stood outside the Van Andel Arena in downtown Grand Rapids. 'We're done with all this Mueller nonsense, thank God, and now it's going to be so much easier.'

Greg Aselbekian, a stock trader who came to Michigan from Chicago to see Trump for the 13th time, said that 'in a way it seems almost like it's all new, like Trump is wiped clean.'

'We had huge momentum after election night,' Aselbekian recalled. 'Everybody was just gung-ho and happy about him. His supporters were energized.'

'Right now, this is – that. This is like, they finally ended the hoax.'

Near a stage where a live band played rock-and-roll standards, Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany told DailyMail.com that they both have it right.

'That's a fair characterization,' she said. 'This president has been under investigation since before he even became president, since the FBI investigation began in 2015. So we've had three years of relentless investigation based on nothing.'

'Here we are today: No more special counsel, no more investigating, and a president who can govern,' McEnany said.

Like voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Michiganders stunned politics-watchers by flipping from blue to red as they followed Trump's election-year economic swashbuckling, and the president's campaign knows it needs a repeat performance to give him four more years in the White House.

With his ego running hot and his moral outrage firing on all cylinders, Trump will give his first solo performance Thursday night since Special Counsel Robert Mueller cleared him of allegations that his campaign colluded with Russians to improve his chances in 2016.

President Donald Trump will travel Thursday to Grand Rapids, Michigan for his first public campaign rally since Special Counsel Robert Mueller cleared him of allegations he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election

Trump made Grand Rapids his final campaign stop in 2016, speaking to a few thousand people at 1 o'clock in the morning before heading home to New York City to await what would be a world-stunning victory

Trump boasted Thursday on Twitter that manufacturing jobs including those in the automotive sector are coming back to the rust belt; Fiat Chrysler said last month that it will create 6,500 new jobs in Michigan as it ramps up Jeep production

But voters in Grand Rapids and surrounding Kent County were responding to Trump's economic message as much as to his bluster when they gave him a 9,497-vote edge – nearly equal to his final margin of 10,704 in the entire state – and the president knows they want to hear he still has his eye on the ball.

'Will be talking about the many exciting things that are happening to our Country, but also the car companies, & others, that are pouring back into Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North & South Carolina & all over!' he tweeted Thursday morning.

Fiat Chrysler announced in February that it would ramp up its Jeep manufacturing capacity in Michigan to make way for a new SUV model, creating 6,500 jobs in the process.

The company said its $4.5 billion investment would also cause 1,370 job losses in Illinois. Since Trump lost the Prairie State to Hillary Clinton by more than 800,000 votes, the White House won't likely make any promises to get those positions back.

But Michigan could be the 2020 linchpin.

'If there's a way for Trump to win this time without winning Michigan again, no one has made a good case for it yet,' a Republican operative there said Thursday.

'He'll be back again and again. Grand Rapids is going to look like Grand Central Station in 2020.'

McEnany said the president will be flogging the jobs-heavy message that worked so well in the midwest last time around.

'President Trump won this state, a state not won by a Republican president since the 1980s,' she said. 'And he won it because he promised jobs, he promised reviving manufacturing, he promised to raise wages.'

Voters in Grand Rapids gave Trump most of his 2016 statewide margin in Michigan

Trump will bring a strong 50 per cent approval rating with him this time, according to numbers released Thursday by Rasmussen Reports. That's 3 points higher than Barack Obama's number at the same point in his first term.

The Rasmussen poll is now the only one that samples likely voters' opinions of the president's job performance every weekday. Gallup discontinued its daily tracking poll last year.

A 50 per cent showing matches his best for the year in the survey, which is known for confounding the 'Trump effect' by allowing the president's supporters to register their approval in the anonymity of a push-button phone poll.

Some 2016 polls that required respondents to share their presidential preferences with a live interview appeared to depress Trump's numbers, reflecting how pro-Trump views became increasingly unpopular in public even as they were increasingly common in private.

The president brings a 50 per cent approval ratings to Michigan on Thursday, according to Rasmussen Reports, a number 3 points better than Barack Obama's at the same point in his first term in office

The Van Andel Arena is where Trump will host a rally on Thursday, in downtown Grand Rapids

The president won Kent County, Michigan by about 9,500 votes in 2016, but the same county gave the state's new Democratic governor a 11,600-vote edge two years later, setting up Michigan as a bellwether for 2020

Grand Rapids was the site of then-candidate Trump's final campaign rally before he headed home to New York City in the wee hours of Election Day morning.

A road-weary future president delivered his final 'Crooked Hillary' speech of the campaign as fans waved giant red T-R-U-M-P letters that advance staffers had spray-painted on a loading dock.

The roughly 4,000 people in attendance was impressive for 1:00 a.m. as Monday turned to Tuesday, and included families with small flag-waving children in tow.

During a December 2017 rally in Pensacola, Florida, he claimed 8 times as many showed up.

'We went to Michigan the night of the election. I got there, started speaking at 12:30 in the evening. It was already Election Day. We had 32,000 people there,' Trump said.

'Hillary Clinton went there in an emergency because she was told that day that she was doing badly in Michigan. She went there, she had a crowd of like 600 people. I had 32,000 people. At one in the morning. I said: "Why are we not going to win?" And we won!'

Clinton had appeared a day before Trump at nearby the Grand Valley State University field house, drawing a reported 4,600 people.

General Motors committed to investing $1.8 billion at plants in six states and to creating 700 new jobs this month

On Thursday the president is expected to draw about 11,000. He will have his work cut out for him because the demographics of Kent County are now trending leftward.

When Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer beat a Trump-endorsed Republican last year, she carried Kent County by more than 11,600 votes. She was the first Democratic candidate in a governor's race to win there in 32 years.

It's not yet clear how big a difference having the name 'Trump' on the ballot will have in 2020.

McEnany, the campaign spokeswoman, said in Grand Rapids that Whitmer's success came at a time when 'Trump's name was not on the ballot.'

'His name was on the ballot in 2016, and he won. He won Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. He'll win again in 2020,' she said.

Outside the arena, midway through a red-hatted line that snaked for blocks, auto worker Joe Williams said he has seen no reason to doubt it.

'I voted for him and I'll vote for him again, and we'll see what happens,' said Williams, who makes machine parts at a General Motors plant in a nearby suburb.

'It's like he says. There was no collusion in this Russia thing, and the jobs are coming back, and Make America Great Again, and let's build the wall.'

'He'll be our president for four more years,' said Williams, who took the day off to stand in line and see his hero up close. 'I don't care what anybody says.'