When Trump Rallies Go Viral

"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!"

 Trump tweet, June 19^th.

Few if any of the thousands of individuals attending Trump’s Bank of Oklahoma Center (BOK) rally on June 20^th expected to contract the coronavirus. With safe distancing impossible within that enclosed space, still fewer were expected to and did in fact wear masks. To some, wearing a mask had become a political “anti-Trump” symbol, not a prudent health precaution. The President and those in “long lines” to get into the rally clearly ignored the government’s own Public health officials, including Trump administration epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, who expressed grave concern about Trump’s indoor rally and recommended precautions like face coverings. Even as six Trump staffers (from the advance team) tested positive for COVID-19 before the rally. Asymptomatic CV-19 spreaders? Quite possibly. Color Trump angry red.

But the embarrassment did not stop there. The President was expected to address the massive overflow crowd outside the 19,000-capacity arena before going inside to address the expected packed Tulsa, Oklahoma audience. But there was no overflow crowd, and rally organizers even had to push to make it appear as if there were a full house inside. Lots of empty seats. Bad news for Trump but good news in reducing the number of people risking exposure to the virus. All in a state where Trump carried every single county in the 2016 election. Fear of expected protesters? Too hot to stand outside? People worried about coronavirus with Oklahoma’s latest infection numbers creeping upwards? Especially from older and more vulnerable supporters. Trump’s failing predictions, increasingly obvious incompetence, and his resultant slippage in the polls?

Was the event sabotaged by anti-Trumpers? “TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.” New York Times, June 21^st. That may have had an impact, but traditionally, Trump’s diehard, passionate supporters have always gathered by the thousands outside these rallies with no expectation of getting tickets to enter. That clearly did not happen.

So, given Trump’s proclivity to blame others for his failures, who was his scapegoat for this debacle? He fell back onto the same-old, same-old. “Trump quickly blamed the ‘fake news’ for discouraging turnout and said ‘we had some very bad people outside, they were doing some very bad things,’ intimating that his supporters had been prevented from entering the arena.” Yahoo News, June 20^th. The “bad people” protesters purportedly blocking the entrance to the arena to this rally were a 30-minute walk away! Video footage outside the BOK Center confirmed that no one was blocking anything. Maybe even the protesters wanted to avoid the roiling super-spreaders heading inside.

When anti-Trumpers did mount a credible protest that moved blocks away from the BOK Center, local right-wing hooligans, backed by the police, closed in for some Trumpy fun: “Hundreds of marchers flooded the city’s downtown streets and blocked traffic at times, but police reported just one arrest as of Saturday afternoon [noted above]. Many on foot chanted, and some occasionally got into shouting matches with Trump supporters, who outnumbered them and yelled, ‘all lives matter.’… Later in the evening, a group of armed men began following the protesters. When the protesters blocked an intersection, a man wearing a Trump shirt got out of a truck and spattered them with pepper spray. Police later deployed an irritant gas to try and make the group disperse.” Associated Press, June 20^th. Otherwise: Lots of music. Lots of dancing. Shockingly peaceful.

There were so many empty seats at the rally that it would have been possible to have implemented safe distancing… but the optics for Mr Trump would have been terrible. The Tulsa Fire Marshal estimated 6,200 were in attendance; the Trump campaign said there were over 12,000. The campaign had predicated over 100,000 would show up in Tulsa. So, supporters were jammed into the lower section to suggest a packed house, and the cameras did not stray to empty sections in the upper gallery.

For epidemiologists, completely aware that nothing would stop the first mass Trump rally since the pandemic began – as Trump followers camped for days to gain admission, even as heat seared and rain poured down – this rally became a real-life experiment. This is how they framed the question: “Tulsa, Okla., is about to host an event that scientists call a ‘natural experiment.’ It may offer important clues about one of the COVID-19 pandemic’s most perplexing features: The undetected spread of the novel coronavirus by people who do not appear to be sick…

“Health experts are confident that the potentially deadly pathogen will jump from infected people who show no outward signs of illness to others who entered the arena virus-free… If recent trends in Oklahoma hold steady, 2.1% of those who become sick enough to be diagnosed with COVID-19 will die. And 41% of Oklahomans are at risk of becoming critically ill if infected by virtue of their age or underlying health conditions.” Los Angeles Times, June 20^th.

If the presence of a highly contagious disease in a very dangerous situation weren’t enough, with hundreds of National Guards on station, Tulsa was on full alert pending expected violent protests against the BOK massive gathering. Trump firmly believed he could provoke that nasty but still mysterious “antifa,” and his law and order tough guys would show them a thing or two. But the streets outside the BOK Center were mostly empty once the entire complement of Trump supporters went inside. Tulsa police did arrest a single protester, sitting peacefully on the street (pictured above), on orders from the Trump campaign. Guess those cops worked for Donald Trump and not the city. Strange how that happens.

The rally followed standard Trump excoriation, blame and bellicosity at institutions and individuals who oppose him, growing legions it seems with many defectors from his inner circle and his own party. “Settling into a version of the stump speech that he had delivered many times until he suspended campaigns in March as the coronavirus pandemic swept across America, Trump hit all of his familiar themes: his trade deals with China [which were canceled due to the virus], rebuilding the military, his appointment of hundreds of conservative judges, and told a long anecdote about how much money he saved on the purchase of a new airplane to replace Air Force One.

“Missing from his repertoire was his baiting the camera crews to pan the arena and show the size and enthusiasm of the crowd and thanking the fire marshals for letting him exceed the nominal capacity of the auditorium.

“Trump mentioned what he termed ‘the Chinese virus’ nearly 10 minutes into his remarks and gave himself high marks for his response to it, emphasizing the steps he took to shore up the price of oil. ‘It looked like we were in big trouble, and I got it together,’ Trump said, adding that he had called the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia and ‘got our energy back to almost $40 a barrel.’

“Trump told his crowd that ‘I have done a phenomenal job’ with the pandemic, pointing to the number of COVID-19 tests administered in the U.S. to date. But he also complained that more testing had revealed more cases of the disease caused by coronavirus.” Yahoo News. Trump’s statement that excessive testing was the sole reason CV-19 numbers seem so bad was vehemently contradicted by the measurable increases in CV-19 hospitalizations, admissions to intensive care units and rising deaths, numbers unrelated to test results. The White House later claimed Trump was “joking” about limiting testing. Either it was believable or a completely inappropriate subject area for humor. Painting himself as a friend of African Americans, unlike the lethargic “sleepy Joe” Biden, eyes around the nation were rolling. Hard Trumpy punches just don’t connect particularly well anymore.

Also good, he made oil more expensive for everybody but not enough to save American oil industry jobs that needed a much higher price for their more expensive fracked product. And that “silent majority” apparently remained silent by not showing up to the rally at all. Then the audience dispersed, perhaps to become super-spreaders in their own communities. Time certainly will tell. If they get sick, they signed waivers relieving the campaign and the BOK Center of liability. I wonder if those they infect would be able to sue, since these innocent secondary infection victims didn’t sign any waivers or assume any risks.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and a stumbling bumbling Trump can’t even muster a rally crowd in the one of the Trumpiest states in the land, a most interesting development that just might become infectious.