Donald Trump sows division and promises
'greatness' at Tulsa rally flop
US president’s much hyped return turned to humiliation
when he failed to fill arena in Republican stronghold of Oklahoma
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Sun 21 Jun
2020 04.21 BSTLast modified on Sun 21 Jun 2020 05.14 BST
Donald Trump
declared “the silent majority is stronger than ever before” at his comeback
rally on Saturday, but thousands of empty seats appeared to tell a different
story.
The US
president’s much hyped return to the campaign trail turned to humiliation when
he failed to fill a 19,000-capacity arena in the Republican stronghold of
Oklahoma, raising fresh doubts about his chances of winning re-election.
“The
Emperor has no crowd,” tweeted Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Barack
Obama.
The
overwhelmingly white gathering at Trump’s first rally since March was dwarfed
by the huge multiracial crowds that have marched for Black Lives Matter across
the country in recent weeks, reinforcing criticism that the president is badly
out of step with the national mood.
The flop in
Tulsa was an unexpected anticlimax for an event that seemed to offer a
combustible mix of Trump, protests over racial injustice and a coronavirus
pandemic that has killed nearly 120,000 Americans and put more than 40m out of
work.
First,
Trump’s planned speech to an overflow event outside the venue was cancelled due
to lack of attendance. Cable news networks showed a “Trump” lectern standing
idle as workers dismantled a stage.
Then the
rally venue itself was estimated to be only two-thirds full, with numerous
empty seats in the upper tier and empty space on the area floor, despite his
campaign having claimed that it received more than a million ticket requests.
One explanation for the disconnect spread rapidly online as Twitter users
suggested many of the requests were fakes filed by bored teens and even fans of
Korean pop music playing a prank on the US president.
But to
Trump officials Oklahoma had surely seemed a safe bet for the so-called
“transition to greatness” event; Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton 65% to 29%
in 2016. Yet the plan began to unravel when the rally, originally scheduled for
Friday, was moved back a day following criticism that it would have clashed
with Juneteenth, and in a city where in 1921 white supremacists killed an
estimated 300 black residents.
The Trump
campaign was also condemned for ignoring warnings from public health experts
about the dangers of holding the biggest indoor gathering yet seen during the
pandemic. Oklahoma has seen a 91% jump in its coronavirus cases over the past
week. Six staff members who helped set up the event tested positive and there
were fewer face masks among supporters than “Make America great again” signs.
The
president appeared to trivialise the virus, “Testing is a double-edged sword,”
he told the rally. “We’ve tested now 25 million people. It’s probably 20
million people more than anybody else. Germany’s done a lot. South Korea’s done
a lot. Here’s the bad part, When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to
find more people. You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people,
‘Slow the testing down, please!’”
He also
mused that Covid-19 has many different names, including the racist term “kung
flu”. The crowd cheered.
It was a
characteristic moment in a rambling speech that lasted nearly two hours but
never caught fire. Trump offered few surprises, planting himself firmly on the
side of law and order, lambasting the media and stoking division, hatred and
fear.
“The silent
majority is stronger than ever before,” he insisted, echoing the former
president Richard Nixon. “Five months from now we’re going to defeat Sleepy Joe
Biden. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln and we are the party of law and
order.”
Warning
against defunding police, he said: “It’s one in the morning, and a very tough – I used the word on occasion – hombre is
breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away as a traveling
salesman or whatever he may do. And you call 911 and they say, ‘I’m sorry this
number is no longer working.’”
Trump, who
has faced withering attacks for his response to the protests, which included
threatening to deploy the US military, claimed: “I’ve done more for the black
community in four years than Joe Biden has done in 47 years.”
But he
offered no compassion for George Floyd or thousands of protesters who have
taken to the streets against police brutality. Instead he railed against the
recent removals of Confederate statues.
“The
unhinged leftwing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrating our
monuments, our beautiful monuments, tear down our statues and punish, cancel
and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and
total control, we’re not conforming,” he said.
Election
opponent Biden was dismissed as “a helpless puppet of the radical left”,
“puppet for China” and “very willing Trojan horse for socialism”.
Trump also
took some long digressions. Clearly stung by media coverage of his slow,
faltering walk down a ramp at the graduation ceremony for the US military
academy at West Point last week, he riffed about it being steep and his
slippery leather-soled shoes putting him at risk of falling in front of the
cameras.
The low
turnout will be a blow to Trump, whose campaign reportedly saw it as a way to
revive his flagging spirits amid slumping poll numbers. The president had said
last Monday: “ We’ve never had an empty seat. And we certainly won’t in
Oklahoma.”
But
confronted by empty seats that may prove more telling than any opinion poll,
Trump hailed his supporters as “warriors” and blamed protesters for the poor
turnout: “We had some very bad people outside. They were doing bad things.” He
also described them as a “bunch of maniacs”.
The Trump
campaign separately claimed that protesters interfered with the president’s
supporters, even blocking access to the metal detectors, which prevented people
from entering the rally. But multiple reporters on the ground saw no evidence
of this.
Rallies are
Trump’s lifeblood. As usual, this one ended with the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t
Always Get What You Want.”
 |
Richard
Wolffe
Campaign officials should be ready for firings and
fury after a pathetic event made worse by wretched attempted excuses
Published
onSun 21 Jun 2020 03.41 BST
There have
been so many reasons to feel embarrassed about Donald Trump.
There was
the time he paid off a porn star. There was the time he lied about the size of
his inauguration crowd. The time he talked about the big water around Puerto
Rico. The time he thought you could kill the coronavirus by injecting yourself
with bleach.
But nothing
truly comes close to the embarrassment of his so-called comeback rally in
Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday.
It was so
toe-curlingly cringeworthy, such a crushing humiliation. There are 80s pop
bands who have enjoyed greater comebacks than Donald Trump.
To
understand how much of his insides will always melt at the thought of that
Tulsa rally, it’s worth quoting Trump’s fine words just before he boarded
Marine One at the White House.
“The event
in Oklahoma is unbelievable,” he boasted. “The crowds are unbelievable. They
haven’t seen anything like it. And we will go there now. We’ll give a,
hopefully, good speech. We’re going to see a lot of great people, a lot of
great friends. And pretty much, that’s it. OK?”
Trump got punked by several hundred thousand TikTok
users, organized by a grandmother in Fort Dodge, Iowa
We really
haven’t seen anything like that. For a man who loves peddling superlatives,
this was the worst measure of his oh-so-sad popularity. The lowest point in
electoral incompetence. The saddest campaign fiasco.
The event
in Oklahoma was literally unbelievable if you believe that the Trump campaign
is competent, and that Trump himself is actually popular. That’s the weird
thing about our populist president: his approval ratings have never cracked 50%
and are now stuck firmly in the low 40s. Perhaps that’s why he’s trailing Joe
Biden by double-digits in recent polls.
As Trump
likes to say: Pretty much, that’s it. At least it is for everyone grifting at
the Trump campaign. Especially Brad Parscale, the Ferrari-driving manager who
went from website builder to social media genius in 2016 but who now faces an
imminent return to his website-building career, after predicting a monster
rally in Tulsa.
Parscale
bragged about “over 1m ticket requests” earlier this week, a number he was so
confident about that he built an outdoor event stage for Trump to talk to the
massive overflow crowd. That was the day after Parscale tweeted about the
“biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be
amazing!”
Brad, it
was indeed amazing. You got punked by several hundred thousand TikTok users,
organized by a grandmother in Fort Dodge, Iowa.
Mary Jo
Laupp was apparently so upset by the original date and place of Trump’s rally –
the city where one of America’s worst racist massacres took place, in 1921 –
that she asked people to sign up for the rally and not show up.
Laupp only
joined TikTok earlier this year, but her call connected with thousands of K-Pop
fans who are what Trump might call a silent majority.
Trump knows
as much about Korean pop as he does about the Tulsa massacre and Juneteenth,
the original date of his epic comeback rally. Of course he had to ask a black
Secret Service agent to explain the meaning of Juneteenth, the holiday marking
the emancipation of enslaved people.
“I did
something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” he told the Wall Street
Journal. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had
ever heard of it.”
As it
happened, nobody has ever heard of Trump’s comeback either. That’s in Oklahoma,
a state he won by 36 points in 2016. A state no Democratic presidential nominee
has won since 1964.
Perhaps the
Secret Service could do Trump another favor by explaining how his official
excuse for the miserable crowds is even more laughable than all that bragging
about MAGA fans.
“Sadly
protesters interfered with supporters, even blocking access to the metal
detectors, which prevented people from entering the rally,” said Tim Murtaugh,
a campaign spokesman who should urgently seek alternative employment.
CNN
reporters estimated there were around 175 protesters in Tulsa, so few, in fact,
that the sidewalks were clear. Pool reporters traveling with the presidential
motorcade said they saw no protesters or supporters en route.
This is the
second time in one week that Trump has blown up his own campaign. If the
geniuses running his train-wreck of a re-election had any argument against
Biden it was this: Biden was soft on China and too unpopular to build a crowd.
But then
came John Bolton’s book, revealing Trump’s bootlicking approach to being tough
on China. Trump told Xi Jinping he was the greatest leader in Chinese history,
which is quite a long time, according to the Secret Service.
Then the
campaign was readying the most awesome contrast between the Tulsa rally and
Biden’s socially-distanced campaigning. “Barely There Biden” was supposed to be
the sequel to “Beijing Biden”.
There’s
something else that’s barely there: Trump supporters.
To be fair,
if they weren’t discouraged by the many dozens of protesters, Trump’s multitude
of Maga-heads might have been discouraged by the pandemic that is now surging
in, um, Tulsa.
The Trump
White House and campaign would love its fans to pretend the pandemic has
disappeared, like a miracle, just as Trump said it would. Sadly six of their
own staffers tested positive for the virus on the day of the Tulsa rally, so
this is a miracle that is moving as quickly as a president shuffling down a
ramp.
Trump told
the crowd at great length why he couldn’t possibly walk down a ramp unaided. He
even re-enacted his walk down the deadly incline. He also treated them to a
long excuse about why he couldn’t hold a glass of water with one hand. It
apparently has something to do with protecting his expensive silk tie. Man of
the people, that Trump guy.
Just as
well he didn’t try to heal the nation’s racial divide. He might have tried to
re-enact something far worse.
For the
half-filled arena (capacity, 19,000), it was hardly worth risking infection for
this mask-free, fact-free and momentum-free event.
“I wish
they would spread out a bit,” said CNN’s doctor-in-chief Sanjay Gupta. “It
looks like they have the space to do so.”
Soon there
will be even more space freed up at Trump’s campaign headquarters. Team Trump:
don’t bother planning another rally. You are about to lose your job.
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