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Trump Reboots Rallies in Tulsa With Smaller Crowd Than Promised

Trump promised earlier this week that there wouldn’t be an empty seat at the rally.

Trump Reboots Rallies in Tulsa With Smaller Crowd Than Promised
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S. (Photographer: Go Nakamura/Bloomberg)  

Donald Trump’s first campaign rally since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S. drew far fewer supporters than the president and his advisers had predicted, a downbeat end to a day of controversy over efforts to oust a top prosecutor in New York.

“I stand before you today to declare that the silent majority is stronger than ever before,” Trump said in opening his remarks at the BOK Center in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, where hundreds of protesters had demonstrated against his visit. “You are warriors, thank you, we had some very bad people outside, we had some very bad people outside, they were doing some bad things.”

Trump Reboots Rallies in Tulsa With Smaller Crowd Than Promised

Trump promised earlier this week that there wouldn’t be an empty seat at the rally, his first in three months after the pandemic prompted governors and local authorities to issue stay-at-home orders in March. But the poor attendance was poised to join a growing number of indicators that his re-election in November is far from certain.

The president has struggled to maintain enthusiasm for his campaign as coronavirus ravaged the country and cities nationwide were convulsed by protests against police brutality. This week, a damaging new book by Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, and the ousting of the top federal prosecutor in New York added to the president’s travails.

He lags behind his presumptive re-election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, in national polls and surveys of key battleground states. In May, Biden’s campaign outraised Trump’s for the first time, while Trump’s campaign spent twice as much money.

Trump Reboots Rallies in Tulsa With Smaller Crowd Than Promised

Trump lashed out at Biden at his rally, insulting the Democrat’s intelligence and portraying him as captive to liberals in his party.

“Does anybody honestly think he controls these radical maniacs?” Trump said. “Do you know what he says to his wife when he’s not confusing her with his sister?”

Trump was scheduled to speak twice in Oklahoma’s second-largest city, once at an outdoor “Great American Comeback” celebration and later at his signature campaign rally inside the 19,199-capacity BOK Center. But his remarks outdoors, where Trump had planned to address an overflow crowd, were abruptly canceled shortly before he arrived.

Instead, he delivered a meandering speech in excess of 100 minutes inside the arena, touching on topics ranging from the coronavirus outbreak, to his commencement speech at West Point last weekend, to nationwide protests against police brutality.

His remarks were laced with familiar grievances. He called the coronavirus “the Chinese virus” and “Kung flu.” He warned that conceding to protesters’ demands to abolish police departments would leave the wife of a traveling salesmen vulnerable to “a very tough hombre.” And he said that a Democratic congresswoman who is a Somali refugee, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, sought to “make the government of our country just like the country from where she came.”

Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, had boasted this week that more than 1 million people requested tickets to the event. Trump said he expected more than 60,000 of his supporters to show up in Tulsa.

Trump Reboots Rallies in Tulsa With Smaller Crowd Than Promised

The president’s campaign blamed demonstrations for the cancellation of his outdoor remarks, saying protesters had obstructed supporters from entering the venue. There was no way to independently verify the claim, though there were more than 100 protesters on the streets outside the arena.

Some of the demonstrators chanted “hands up don’t shoot,” a phrase common at nationwide protests against police brutality over the past month. Trump supporters entering the rally chanted “go Trump.”

Rallies were the centerpiece of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and have continued through his presidency. The Tulsa rally is Trump’s first since March 3 in Charlotte, when the coronavirus pandemic precipitated stay-at-home orders from governors and local authorities.

The virus, and the Trump administration’s response, continues to shadow his campaign efforts. The huge, indoor gathering in Tulsa has been tagged by health experts as a potential Covid-19 superspreader event given the thousands of attendees sitting or standing shoulder-to-shoulder for hours with no social distancing. The campaign distributed face masks to people entering the arena, but few attendees wore them.

Trump Reboots Rallies in Tulsa With Smaller Crowd Than Promised

On a day when U.S. coronavirus cases had the biggest reported jump in three weeks, six members of Trump’s advance team tested positive for Covid-19 and were sent to quarantine. Oklahoma has among the fewest incidences of coronavirus in the U.S. but its caseload now tops 10,000.

Trump, mostly confined to the White House for three months save for a few side trips, including to West Point’s graduation ceremony last weekend, had drawn energy in the days leading to the event. The rally was intended not just to rejuvenate his campaign, but the candidate himself, according to people familiar with the matter.

In a tweet Friday, Trump expressed excitement, saying that there are “big crowds and lines already forming” and that his campaign “starts” on Saturday night.

The president’s campaign had tweeted video of people lined up for the rally days in advance. Trump called the mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, on Friday to ask him to cancel a planned curfew -- intended to prevent late-night violence between protesters and Trump’s supporters -- so that rally attendees wouldn’t be disturbed.

In his remarks, Trump touched on a range of issues that elicited cheers from supporters. He pledged to confront China over trade, and also took aim at professional athletes who kneel during the U.S. national anthem.

Trump also sought to play down the risks of the pandemic, saying that he had asked advisers to dial back wide-scale testing in the U.S.

“Testing is a double-edged sword,” he said. “When you do testing to that extent you’re going to find more people. So I said to my people, slow the testing down.”

Trump Reboots Rallies in Tulsa With Smaller Crowd Than Promised

There’s no indication that has actually happened, as the number of tests performed nationally have been well over half a million on each of the past two days, according to the Covid Tracking Project, which relies on state data. Total tests administered now exceed 26.5 million.

A White House aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said after Trump’s remarks that the president was speaking in jest when he talked about testing.

Masks were handed out to rally attendees, yet few were seen wearing them, as recommended by health officials to curb the spread of the virus, which has killed more than 119,000 Americans.

Even at the height of the pandemic the president longed for a resumption of the raucous events, which are designed to tap into the enthusiasm of his most hard-core voters.

“For me, it’s a tremendous way of getting the word out,” Trump said in response to a question at an April 17 White House press briefing on the coronavirus pandemic. “I hope we’re going to have rallies. I think they’re going to be bigger than ever.”

The president warned Friday that authorities would treat protesters more harshly than in other major U.S. cities where anti-brutality demonstrations have taken place.

Police in Tulsa were braced for unrest, and protesters jostled with Trump supporters near the stadium.

Trump moved the rally back a day after initially scheduling it for Juneteenth, a commemoration of the end of slavery, drawing criticism that he was insensitive to the plight of African Americans. Tulsa is also the site of one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history, the 1921 sacking of a prosperous Black neighborhood named Greenwood by a White mob.

His campaign sent more than 50 of its surrogates to the rally, including a large contingent representing the campaign’s outreach initiative called “Black Voices for Trump.”

In the hours before his arrival, Trump courted new controversy as Geoffrey S. Berman, the chief federal prosecutor in New York, resigned after a remarkable stand-off with Attorney General William Barr, who said the president had fired him. But Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for Tulsa that Barr was responsible for Berman’s removal, saying “I’m not involved.”

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