Official White House Photo by: Tia Dufour
President Donald J. Trump is escorted by Col. Stephen Snelson, Commander of the 89th Airlift Wing, as he walks from Marine One at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Saturday, June 20, 2020, to Air Force One to begin his trip to Tulsa, Okla.
Thanks to conservative appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court (including one of his own), Donald Trump was having a terrible week even before his dream blew up in his face of opening his re-election campaign with a packed hate rally of supporters in his kind of city, Tulsa, Oklahoma, famous for the worst racist massacre of African Americans in U.S. history.
Campaign officials boasted more than a million adoring fans were requesting tickets. They didn’t realize American kids today are even better at manipulating social media than those Russian intelligence agents who helped elect Trump. Fewer than 6,200 actually showed up, less than a third of the 19,200-seat capacity of the Tulsa arena. Adding to the insult, all those empty seats were blue. An outdoor stage where Trump planned to address the overflow crowd was quickly dismantled.
It definitely wasn’t worth Trump endangering the lives of 6,200 potential Republican voters and everyone in their communities by ignoring the president’s own health experts opposed to holding a deadly super spreader event in Oklahoma, the second fastest rising state in new coronavirus infections.
Slow Down Testing
Trump didn’t care whether the mostly unmasked crowd got infected because they’d already signed waivers agreeing not to sue his campaign. Besides, Trump claims it’s the nation’s governors’ responsibility to protect public health, not his. He told the crowd he’d ordered a slowdown in testing because it kept revealing new cases. White House officials later tried to claim Trump was joking, but that’s a really sick joke with eight states including Oklahoma surging to all-time highs in new cases. Trump also used the racist Asian slur “kung flu” to refer to coronavirus. Trump blames China for his failure to protect America in a worldwide pandemic, but a deadly virus kills indiscriminately without respecting borders.
One of the president’s most racist actions was choosing Tulsa for his opening campaign hate rally in the first place. In 1921, after a dubious rumor that a black youth had assaulted a white woman in an elevator, a white Tulsa mob rampaged through the city’s prosperous black Greenwood neighborhood murdering 300 African Americans and herding 3,000 more into concentration camps after looting and burning their homes.
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It was a terrible choice for the opening of Trump’s Republican presidential campaign, particularly during multiracial protests nationally against violent police treatment of unarmed African Americans after the horrific police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
More Divisive Words
Trump wasn’t going to Tulsa to offer any words of racial reconciliation or national unity at a time when three-quarters of all Americans polled support ending violent, unequal police treatment of those being policed based on the color of their skin. Instead Trump issued his own threat of violence on Juneteenth Day, a day of African American celebration, against anyone protesting his Tulsa rally the next day. “Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!”
There was no reason for Trump to open his campaign in Tulsa or even to campaign in overwhelmingly Republican Oklahoma, a state he won by 36 points in 2016. But if his provocative rally inflamed racial violence, it would be a great excuse to declare martial law against those protesting police tactics and ride another wave of white racism to election like he did four years earlier. But millions of Americans seeing a videotape of Floyd desperately begging for his life during his slow-motion murder have put the nation in a very different place. The peaceful protesters refused to take Trump’s bait.
That didn’t stop Trump from lying about them, telling Tulsa they were “very violent people. And our people are not nearly as violent. But if they ever were, it would be a terrible, terrible day for the other side, because I know our people.” Just in case any dangerous extremists in the crowd failed to get Trump’s message about what he’d love to see “our people” do to protesters, near the end of the rally Trump made it even more explicit: “When you see those lunatics all over the streets, it’s damn nice to have arms.”
Trump doesn’t know much about American history, but someone should tell him Oklahoma didn’t become a state until 1907. That was 42 years after the Confederate army fought the United States. That means statues of Confederate generals are not part of Oklahoma’s “great heritage.”
Trump’s hopes of inciting a new civil war to boost his dwindling re-election prospects with the return of raucous, chanting Trump hate rallies laughing and cheering every vile, racist, lying presidential attack failed miserably, leaving him furious.
But it was the most hopeful weekend in four years for all the rest of us that the worst presidential mistake in American history may soon be over.
Read more from Joel McNally here.
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