-Angela
Donald Trump billed his Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally as a campaign launch, apparently hoping for a reset at a moment when his poll numbers are plunging.Photograph by Evan Vucci / AP /
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.
A long spring of pain has just ended in America; on the first night of summer, Trump both proved incapable of addressing that pain and confessed that he has contributed to it. From the moment covid-19 emerged, Trump has done his best to downplay the disease. “I like the numbers where they are,” he said back in March—a sentiment that then became government policy. More recently, Trump has become fixated on a peculiar, circular argument about testing. “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases,” he said in May, an assertion as inane as it is inarguable. On Saturday, Trump took things a step further, telling us—bragging, really—that he’d discouraged government officials from trying to get a full picture of the outbreak. “I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please,’ ” he said. Within minutes, Trump’s aides were trying to clean up his mess, saying the President had been “joking.”
That we have a President whose priority is denying reality is a public-health catastrophe. But what did he even want his supporters to take away from this confession? Campaign rallies play a special role in Trump’s life and his politics. These events are where the legend of his connection to his base was born. White House reporters often tell us that Trump’s aides think of these events as Presidential mood enhancers: when things are tough, Trump can blow off a little steam and enjoy the fawning of thousands of fans clad in merchandise bearing his name. But Saturday’s event, which was supposed to make a big show of the country bouncing back by attracting a capacity crowd to a big indoor arena, was a logistical nightmare for Trump’s campaign. Public-health officials in Tulsa begged the President not to hold the event, and the campaign, though it didn’t require the use of masks, made attendees sign health waivers in order to secure tickets. On Saturday, news came that a half-dozen campaign employees who worked on organizing the rally had tested positive for the coronavirus.
The rally was originally scheduled for Friday, which was Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in America. In 1921, Tulsa was the site of the Black Wall Street massacre, in which white residents of the city killed hundreds of their black neighbors. The legacy of that event continues to inform the relationship between the city’s black residents and the police. Following an outcry about the date of the rally, Trump was forced to move the event by a day. The crowd that turned up on Saturday could hardly fill even the lower half of the nineteen-thousand-seat B.O.K. Center. A separate, outdoor event where Trump was slated to speak was scrapped for lack of an audience. Trump’s campaign tried to blame the media and protesters for scaring people off, but protests in Tulsa on Saturday were small. (“We had some very bad people outside,” Trump said early in his speech—an echo of the way he once described white-supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people.”) Meanwhile, teen-agers on TikTok were claiming that they’d helped to kneecap the event, by making thousands of phantom ticket requests online—out-trolling a President who has made trolling his chief political strategy. There’s just no escaping the interconnected crises facing the country right now, even at a Trump rally. Waivers or no, the red “Make America Great Again” hats had to compete with blue and black face masks.
The over-all effect of the event was to show a campaign and a candidate struggling to figure out what to say. “We will make American great again—again!” Mike Pence said at the end of his introductory remarks. “Keep America Great,” the slogan that Trump had worked up for his reëlection bid, seems to have been scrapped. Trump filed for reëlection the day he was inaugurated, in 2017—his governing style is one of permanent campaigning, and he has never stopped running for President—and yet he billed Saturday’s speech as a kind of campaign launch. “We begin our campaign, we begin our campaign,” he said. Clearly, he was hoping for a kind of reset, at a moment when his poll numbers are cratering.
When Trump did speak of the coronavirus, he spoke of it not as an illness (a topic which always unnerves him), nor as an economic calamity for many, but as a force which robbed him of a key campaign talking point. Without the pre-pandemic unemployment numbers to tout, he spoke of judges, military spending, tax cuts for the wealthy, and deregulation. He barely mentioned his two big campaign promises from 2016, building the wall and draining the swamp—both now reminders as much of what he hasn’t done as what he has. He took some shots at Joe Biden, attacking him from the left in one breath (“America should not take lectures on racial justice from Joe Biden”) and from the right in the next (“Biden is a very willing Trojan horse for socialism”). Another President might have something to work with here, facing a candidate with Biden’s record of backing “tough on crime” legislation in the Senate at a time when people are in the streets protesting against police violence and systemic racism. But Trump is the President who, three years ago, encouraged police officers to rough up people they arrest. He’s the President who, three weeks ago, tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
In Tulsa, Trump seemed to be enjoying himself. He was doing his arm flaps and his struts and his small-mouthed yelling like it was the summer of 2016. (He even took some shots at Hillary Clinton.) But the past few months have made his limitations more visible than ever. He’s been unable to shout down a virus, or to make protests a wedge issue. What will Trump be able to campaign on in the months ahead? The public has sided with the people demonstrating in the streets. Polls show that large majorities of Americans believe that racism is a major problem in the country. This is a change. And, as much as it is an accomplishment of the Black Lives Matter movement, it might also have something to do with the special, public abuse that the man in the White House has unleashed these past five years on black people, Muslims, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. (Not to mention women, the disabled, and gay and trans people. The list is long.) Meanwhile, on Saturday, even before Trump was finished giving his speech, people were sharing clips on social media of maga-clad fans in the audience, yawning as their President rattled on.
Eric Lach is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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