Tag: Trump Tulsa rally

Two Trump campaign staffers who attended rally test positive for coronavirus

Axios logoTwo members of the Trump campaign staff who attended the president’s rally in Tulsa on Saturday have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the campaign’s communications director Tim Murtaugh.

The big picture: The campaign says the two staffers wore face masks during the entire event, which drew thousands of supporters. Health officials, including several in Tulsa, had urged the campaign to delay the rally, warning of the risk of spreading the virus. Six campaign staffers for the president were quarantined after testing positive before the rally last week,.

What they’re saying:

“After another round of testing for campaign staff in Tulsa, two additional members of the advance team tested positive for the coronavirus. These staff members attended the rally but were wearing masks during the entire event. Upon the positive tests, the campaign immediately activated established quarantine and contact tracing protocols.”

— Communications director Tim Murtaugh

Continue reading.

With ‘kung flu,’ ‘thugs,’ and ‘our heritage,’ Trump leans on racial grievance as he reaches for a campaign reset

Washington Post logoHe referred to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus as the “kung flu.” He called racial justice demonstrators “thugs.” He attacked efforts to take down Confederate statues as an assault on “our heritage.” And in an ominous hypothetical, he described a “very tough hombre” breaking into a young woman’s home while her husband is away.

President Trump has long used his raucous rallies to road test potential campaign themes and attack lines. And while much attention on his Saturday night appearance in Tulsa focused on the sparse turnout for his first rally since the pandemic ended mass gatherings, Trump’s litany of racially offensive stereotypes sent a clear signal about how he plans to try to revive his flagging reelection effort.

Even at a moment of national reckoning over race and racism, Trump demonstrated the extent to which the final four months of the 2020 election will build on the darker themes of a previous campaign notable for its attacks on Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. Continue reading.

‘You guys look silly’: Fox News’ Chris Wallace annihilates Trump spokeswoman for ‘denying reality’ in Tulsa debacle

AlterNet logoFox News host Chris Wallace challenged Trump 2020 campaign spokesperson Mercedes Schlapp for making “campaign speeches” during an interview on Sunday.

On his Fox News Sunday program, Wallace noted that President Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally on Saturday had been sparsely attended despite the fact that the president claimed nearly a million people had requested tickets.

“We all saw the pictures last night,” Wallace explained. “The arena was no more than two-thirds full. And the outdoor rally was cancelled because there was no overflow crowd. What happened?” Continue reading.

Donald Trump’s Empty Campaign Rally in Tulsa

In some ways, what Donald Trump didn’t say on Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a rally that was billed as his big post-pandemic return to the campaign trail, matters more than what he did. In more than ninety minutes onstage, not one mention of the murder of George Floyd. Not one mention of the murder of Breonna Taylor. Barely a mention of the hundred and nineteen thousand Americans killed by covid-19, or of the tens of millions thrown out of work, facing uncertain futures for themselves and their families. This is the President who was, just a few weeks ago, supposedly considering a big speech on race and unity. Instead, on Saturday, Trump did a cool twenty minutes on his experience of walking down a slippery ramp after delivering the graduation speech at West Point last weekend. He also bragged about the stock market; called covid-19 the “kung flu”; accused Representative Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, of wanting to turn America into a failed state “just like the country from where she came”; and said that he instructed a military officer during negotiations with Boeing not to put anything “in writing,” because he wanted to potentially skip out on paying a multimillion-dollar order-cancellation fee for new Air Force One planes. Continue reading “Donald Trump’s Empty Campaign Rally in Tulsa”

Biden adviser blasts Trump for Tulsa rally

Symone Sanders assails Trump for talking about slowing down coronavirus testing.

Symone Sanders, senior adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, slammed into President Donald Trump’s Saturday return rally, saying it set a dangerous example amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Sanders on “Fox News Sunday” decried Trump’s statement during the Tulsa rally that he asked the administration to slow down coronavirus testing to contain optics of a growing outbreak. She also lambasted Trump for holding a rally in a confined, indoor space — creating conditions that health experts say are highly conducive to transmitting the disease.

“The most damning thing from that rally last night, Chris, was, in fact, the president’s admission that he quote unquote said to his people to slow down the testing,” Sanders told host Chris Wallace. “This is an appalling attempt to lessen the numbers only to make them look good.” Continue reading.

Here’s the line from Trump’s Tulsa rally you can bet we’ll see in 2020 campaign ads

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump on Saturday spoke for 101 minutes during a campaign rally in Tulsa.

There was one line in the speech that stood out.

“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘slow the testing down,’” Trump said. Continue reading.

Trump’s rally looked like his vision of America: Limited and pitiless

Washington Post logoThe president paused for dramatic effect before he walked onstage at his Tulsa rally. He was silhouetted under a blue and white “Make America Great Again” banner and against an American flag. And in the few seconds that he stood basking in adulation, he resembled a giant black rectangle. A massive, inanimate void.

When he emerged into the light, he walked into the cheering embrace of a mostly unmasked crowd bedecked in red Trump hats and MAGA T-shirts, along with the occasional QAnon tank top and “Don’t Tread on Me” pullover.

It’s tempting to say it was a crowd that didn’t look anything like America because it appeared to be so lacking in diversity — so overwhelmingly white. But, in fact, the crowd looked precisely like America does in more than a few suburbs, counties and hollers. In churches and offices. In the president’s inner circle. There were only a few brown faces sprinkled directly behind the president’s lectern, along with a small cluster of them under “Black Voices for Trump” signs. Continue reading.

Trump Returns To Campaign Trail With A Familiar Message In A Changing World

In his first big campaign event since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, President Trump reached back into his culture war playbook to paint an image of a left-wing extremist dystopia that will take hold if he is defeated and Democratic opponent Joe Biden is elected this November.

“If the Democrats gain power, then the rioters will be in charge and no one will be safe and no one will have control,” Trump said to a crowd, which numbered in the thousands but failed to fill an arena in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday night and was far smaller than Trump’s campaign promised. “Joe Biden is not the leader of his party. Joe Biden is a helpless puppet of the radical left.”

But then Trump seemed to undercut that message, saying of Biden, “He’s not radical left” and that “he was never radical left. But now he’s controlled by the radical left.” Continue reading.

Trump Had Promised a Huge Rally in Tulsa. He Spoke to a Half-Empty Arena.

Things didn’t quite go as President Donald Trump had planned in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday for his first campaign rally since March. Days earlier, Trump had said “we’re either close to or over 1 million people wanting to go” to the rally. “Nobody has heard of numbers like this,” he boasted. “We expect to have a record-setting crowd. We’ve never had an empty seat, and we certainly won’t in Oklahoma.” When Saturday night rolled around, though, there were plenty of empty seats at the 19,000-capacity arena in Tulsa. [Update, June 21, 2020, at 10 a.m.: Even saying “half-empty” may be an exaggeration. Andrew Little, the public information officer for the Tulsa Fire Department, told Forbes that attendance at the rally was just under 6,200 people. Update, June 21, 2020, at 1:30 p.m.: A Trump campaign official said 12,000 people entered the arena.]

Trump’s campaign had expected such a huge crowd that the president planned to give a speech to an overflow group of supporters outside of the rally. But the outdoor portion ended up being canceled as there were barely any people there. A “campaign source” told CNN that they were afraid of angering Trump because of the thin crowds. In canceling the outside speech, the campaign blamed protesters, saying they “interfered with supporters” and blocked “access to metal detectors, which prevented people from entering the rally.” Reporters on the ground, though, noted that there weren’t really a lot of protesters in Tulsa on Saturday. Continue reading.