VIDEO:
Just look
at this endless long description of the ramp and glass of water episode:
“He shouldn’t waste his best lines in an ocean of
stuff that won’t ultimately work or matter.”
Scott
Jennings, a former top political adviser in the George W. Bush White House
2020
ELECTIONS
Inside Trump's Oklahoma debacle
The rally was meant to be a turning point in Trump's
fortunes and efforts to take on Biden. Instead, Trump was furious and his
campaign is reeling.
By ALEX
ISENSTADT
06/21/2020
11:36 PM EDT
Donald
Trump’s campaign advisers had it all mapped out: A blowout rally in Oklahoma —
coupled with a withering ad launched days earlier questioning Joe Biden’s
mental acuity — would finally shift the focus to the elusive Democrat amid the
worst stretch of Trump’s presidency.
The ad
tested well, and Trump attacked Biden extensively during the Saturday night
event, saying the former vice president has “surrendered to his party and to
the left-wing mob.” But his remarks were lost in a meandering and
grievance-filled two-hour speech, which included a lengthy rendition of him
drinking water during his West Point commencement speech a week earlier.
“His lines
going after Biden were very effective, particularly on Biden being a tool of
the radical left. But I’d like to see that focused message take up more space
in the overall speech, because it will resonate with wobbly suburbanites,” said
Scott Jennings, who was a top political adviser in the George W. Bush White
House. “He shouldn’t waste his best lines in an ocean of stuff that won’t
ultimately work or matter.”
This
account of what went wrong in Tulsa and the reckoning underway in the aftermath
is based on interviews with more than a half-dozen reelection campaign and
White House officials. The partly-empty arena was the biggest embarrassment and
has received the lion’s share of media attention. But the issues surrounding
the rally — an event that his advisers unanimously saw as a turning point for
Trump — extended beyond crowd size and raised questions about the strength of
his campaign less than five months until the election.
“He shouldn’t waste his best lines in an ocean of
stuff that won’t ultimately work or matter.”
Scott Jennings, a former top political adviser in the
George W. Bush White House
Trump was
described as furious over the negative media coverage of the rally, much of
which focused on the president’s failure to fill the arena and the idea that
the president’s loyalists were cooling in their support. Some people close to
the president suspected he'd been overeager to restart rallies at a time when
the public was still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and racial protests.
The
planning stage
Planning for
the Oklahoma event began a few weeks prior. With much of the country still in
lockdown, campaign officials had few options to choose from. They zeroed in on
a small number of states with loose restrictions, including South Dakota —
where Trump is planning a July 3 visit to view fireworks from Mount Rushmore —
and Oklahoma. After settling on Oklahoma, they narrowed the location to
Oklahoma City or Tulsa. They picked Tulsa, where the state’s Republican
governor and lieutenant governor are from and because they saw local officials
as more Trump-friendly.
But they
soon faced a major complication: Following an uproar over the initial decision
to hold the rally on Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the emancipation of
slaves, the president pushed the event a day later.
Still,
interest in the event was high. About 1.1 million people registered to attend,
forcing aides to begin making plans to stage an added outdoor event. Aides knew
the 1.1 million figure was inflated: After sorting through the sign-ups — a
process that included looking at registrants' voting histories — they
determined that about 300,000 were fake.
To winnow
down the likely audience further, advisers estimated that only between 200,000
and 300,000 people lived within immediate driving distance. Worst-case
scenario, they concluded, was an audience of about 60,000.
But when
they woke up Saturday morning, Trump advisers realized things were going
downhill. Protesters were convening outside the arena. News emerged that a
half-dozen advance staffers had tested positive for coronavirus, a revelation
that angered the president ahead of his departure for Oklahoma and further
amplified fears that the event could spread the disease. Hours before the rally
was to get underway, it became clear to the president’s lieutenants that a
debacle was underway and that there would be a patchwork of empty seats.
Making
matters worse was the campaign was it's initial declaration that 1 million
people had signed up to see Trump in Tulsa, a boast that was now destined to
fall on its face.
Struggling
with how to take on Biden
While a
packed arena was needed to project strength, the campaign was determined to use
the rally as the kickoff in a sustained effort to sow doubt about Biden's
capacity to be president.
Trump
advisers have long been convinced that if the race is a referendum on him,
rather than a choice between him and Biden, Trump will likely lose. Yet they’ve
vacillated over how to go after the former vice president, especially as he's
stayed out of the spotlight during the pandemic. Some aides want to cast him as
as too cozy with China; others are eager to portray him as too old and on the
decline mentally, or as a Beltway insider.
Trump
himself has been surprisingly hesitant to engage his opponent — at least by
Trump standards — and some advisers think he’s struggling with how to take him
on. During an interview with POLITICO last week, the president largely turned
his attention away from Biden, and instead was preoccupied with former national
security adviser John Bolton.
In the days
leading up to the rally, campaign and White House officials crafted a speech
that focused on portraying Biden as mentally diminished and beholden to the
liberal fringe.
Trump
delivered the anti-Biden script on stage, yet it was his digressions —
defending his water-drinking and ramp-walking abilities, referring to
coronavirus as "Kung Flu," and noting that he told his staff to
“slow” down coronavirus testing to head off spikes in reported cases — that
ended up driving post-rally headlines. Trump aides said later he was joking
about the testing slowdown and was trying to illustrate his point that more testing
reveals more cases.
“They test
and they test. We had tests that people don't know what's going on. We got
tests. We got another one over here, the young man's 10 years old. He's got the
sniffles. He'll recover in about 15 minutes. That's the case,” Trump said
during the speech.
No more
mega-rallies?
Party
officials say the Oklahoma mishap has scrambled plans for future arena-style
rallies. One idea is to hold smaller events at outdoor venues like airport
hangars or amphitheaters. There's also discussion of holding them in non-urban
areas to make it harder for protesters to gather en masse.
But with
Trump trailing badly in an array of battleground states, some aides are
beginning to wonder whether the Oklahoma snafu portends bigger changes. Some
recalled that George Gigicos, an alum of Trump’s first campaign who oversaw the
staging of the rallies, was fired after Trump expressed unhappiness with how a
2017 event in Phoenix went.
Rumors of a
potential shakeup have hung over the Trump campaign for weeks. Many directed
blame toward campaign manager Brad Parscale in the aftermath of the Saturday
night rally, though Trump aides insisted no change was forthcoming. Parscale is
close to the president and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has broad power
over the reelection apparatus.
The
campaign recently promoted longtime Trump political adviser Bill Stepien to
deputy campaign manager and re-hired 2016 aide Jason Miller — moves designed to
provide additional support to Parscale.
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But after
months of being stuck in the White House, some got the sense Trump was relieved
to get back in front of a crowd — even one a lot smaller than planned.
Rep. Tom
Cole (R-Okla.), who traveled to and from the rally with Trump aboard Air Force
One, said the president spent part of the trip home quizzing people on how
things had gone.
“I think he
thought, ‘Well this is a good start. We’ll go from here,” said Cole. “I think
he’s ready to get on the campaign trail. You get better as you go along, and
that’s the way he probably looks at it.”
 |
Brad Parscale faces Trump 'fury' after Tulsa
comeback rally flops
Campaign chief said millions would attend: a few thousand
did
Rick Wilson: survival at risk as Ivanka and Kushner
seethe
The Room Where It Happened: a broadside to sink Trump?
Tom Lutz in
New York
@tom_lutz
Sun 21 Jun
2020 20.03 BSTLast modified on Mon 22 Jun 2020 01.36 BST
Donald Trump’s
campaign manager, Brad Parscale, was under pressure on Sunday after claiming
hundreds of thousands of people had applied for tickets to the president’s
return to the campaign trail in Tulsa, only for the rally to attract a sparse
crowd.
At the BOK
Center in the Oklahoma city on Saturday night, as the president took the stage
to give his first campaign speech since the Covid-19 pandemic put large parts
of America under lockdown, vast banks of empty seats could be seen.
The Tulsa
fire department said 6,200 people attended. The Trump campaign claimed 12,000.
The arena holds 19,000.
The
campaign had built an “overflow” stage outside the BOK Center, to host brief
remarks by Trump and Mike Pence. Those speeches were cancelled.
Trump’s
demeanour on returning to Washington was widely scrutinised. He was initially
quiet on Twitter on Sunday but the president was reported to be “furious” at
the “underwhelming” event, which followed a week of controversy about whether
it should even be held. According to NBC, Trump was “particularly angry that
before he even left DC, aides made public that six members of team in Tulsa
tested positive for Covid-19”.
CNN
reported that the president’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared
Kushner, were “pissed” that Parscale had promised huge crowds. Trump also
claimed this week that more than a million people wanted to attend his rally.
In a
statement, Parscale blamed the low attendance on “a week’s worth of the fake
news media warning people away from the rally because of Covid and protesters”,
which he said “coupled with recent images of American cities on fire, had a
real impact on people bringing their families and children to the rally”.
He then
appeared to threaten to rescind accreditation for journalists critical of the
Trump campaign.
“For the
media to now celebrate the fear that they helped create is disgusting, but
typical,” he said. “And it makes us wonder why we bother credentialing media
for events when they don’t do their full jobs as professionals.”
Parscale
has been widely credited for his work on the 2016 campaign but pressure has
increased as the re-election campaign heats up, with reports of a president
furious about polling results and pondering a reorganisation.
Trump
trails Joe Biden nationally and in most polls in battleground states.
Rick
Wilson, a bestselling author, former Republican consultant and co-founder of
the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super pac, was critical of Parscale’s
approach.
“Brad broke
the first rule of American politics: under promise and over deliver,” he told
the Guardian. “Brad’s survival now depends on the good offices of his patrons
inside the Trump camp, and [Ivanka and Kushner] are already signaling their
displeasure to the media.
“The only X
factor is whether anyone else in Trump’s crew of skells [and] grifters … has
offered to keep the scam running.”
It has been
reported that the number of applicants for tickets to Saturday’s rally was
inflated by young users of the social media platform TikTok applying but then
deliberately not attending.
“Trump has
been actively trying to disenfranchise millions of Americans in so many ways,
and to me, this was the protest I was able to perform,” Erin Hoffman, an
18-year-old New Yorker, told the New York Times.
The Trump
campaign said protesters blocked entrances and metal detectors, preventing
people from entering the rally. However, reporters on the ground including the
Guardian’s Oliver Laughland said they saw no evidence of such tactics.
As Covid-19
cases in Oklahoma rise, public health officials had warned against holding a
large indoor gathering. The Trump campaign did not require attendees to wear
masks. Some observers speculated fear of Covid-19 may have stopped some
supporters from attending the rally.
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