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Trump Rally Live Updates: Crowd Is Sparse as President Tries to Reignite Campaign
President Trump spoke in Tulsa, Okla., a day after the Juneteenth holiday and took aim at Democrats and the news media.
Right Now
Mr. Trump mocked the coronavirus that has killed 121,000 Americans and claimed he wanted to slow down testing.
Here’s what you need to know:
- Trump’s campaign revival sputters as he holds grievance-filled rally.
- An enthusiastic but smaller-than-expected crowd greeted the president.
- Fact-check: Trump says protesters “were very violent.”
- Fact-check: Trump misleads on military spending, Covid-19 testing.
- Rally workers test positive as Trump supporters gather in Tulsa.
- ‘I will not live in fear.’ Most rally-goers decline to wear masks.
- Black leaders in Tulsa called for the mayor to cancel Trump’s rally.
Trump’s campaign revival sputters as he holds grievance-filled rally.
President Trump’s bid to revive his re-election campaign was off to a rambling start on Saturday night as a far smaller crowd than expected turned out in Tulsa, Okla., for his first rally in months. For almost two hours, he rehashed familiar, grievance-filled themes, demonizing the media and “radical’’ Democrats while bragging about his response to the coronavirus pandemic, even though his administration’s faltering management of the crisis has been widely criticized.
Mr. Trump, appearing in one of his political strongholds from 2016, had hoped that the rally would amount to a self-described “comeback” after politically bruising months. Instead, the event only raised questions about his drawing power and political skills at a time when his poll numbers are falling and allies are worried about his electoral prospects for a second term.
Taking the stage, Mr. Trump framed the rally as the start of his campaign. “We begin, we begin our campaign,” he said, though the campaign had officially kicked off exactly a year ago this week in Orlando, Fla.
He started off by praising the crowd: “You are warriors, thank you,” adding, “we had some very bad people outside.” In reality, there were few protests and heavy security around the BOK Center, which was sparsely filled. Mr. Trump blamed the media for reporting on health concerns ahead of the indoor rally and suppressing the crowd size.
Mr. Trump mocked the coronavirus that has killed 121,000 Americans and claimed he wanted to slow down testing, as he addressed a mostly maskless crowd in a 19,000-seat indoor arena in Tulsa that was sparsely filled. And on the day after Juneteenth, in a city that had one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the nation’s history, Mr. Trump barely spoke about race and did not once mention George Floyd, a black men whose killing by white police officers set off a national reckoning about the country’s own racist past. Instead, he defended confederate monuments and claimed that the left wanted to “demolish our heritage.”
Throughout his speech, Mr. Trump tried to target Democrats. “Try putting A.O.C. in charge of your energy,” he said at one point, referring to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, after bragging that he “got it back together,” apparently referring to an agreement he signed in April for countries to cut back oil-producing output.
Mr. Trump went on an extended rant against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, who is leading the president in the polls and out-raised him by $7 million in the month of May. Mr. Trump described Mr. Biden as a “helpless puppet of the radical left.” He then said that Mr. Biden himself had never been a radical leftist, but claimed he was controlled by the fringes of his party.
The president once again shrugged off the threat from the coronavirus, at one point calling it the “Chinese virus” and the “Kung flu.” He bragged that he has done “a phenomenal job” fighting the pandemic. But he also said that he asked officials to “slow the testing down,” joking that a young man with the “sniffles” would be falsely considered a positive Covid-19 case.
He went on to say, “Open the schools, please.” In the next breath, he blamed the “unhinged left-wing mob” for desecrating the country’s history and tearing down monuments. “They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new oppressive regime in its place,” he said.
Mr. Trump at one point went into an extended riff about how much was demanded of him physically during a speech to graduating cadets at West Point, in order to defend himself against an unflattering video that showed him walking gingerly down a short ramp from the stage. Mr. Trump claimed there was nothing wrong with his health.
Almost two hours into the address, he had yet to make any statement acknowledging the Juneteenth holiday, celebrating the end of slavery, or the country’s deep reckoning with its racist past, which has erupted since the killing of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis. Instead, he demonized people who had mostly been demonstrating peacefully as radical “rioters.’’
Mr. Trump had hoped to pack the 19,000-seat BOK Center and show that America is reopening, but he did not want to bear responsibility for creating a “super spreader” event that sickened his most die-hard supporters. Saturday afternoon brought an inauspicious start to that effort, when his campaign said that six staff members who were working on the event had tested positive for the virus during routine screening.
Masks were being handed out as supporters filed into a designated area at the arena Saturday afternoon, but wearing them was not enforced. Some people threw masks out immediately after they received them.
Inside the arena, meanwhile, most of the attendees were not wearing masks or social distancing. But the bigger concern for Mr. Trump was that as the rally started the arena appeared only a little more than half full. However, about 500,000 people were watching the rally on YouTube across different feeds.
Campaign advisers, who had hyped a mega-rally that would help undercut polls that show Mr. Trump’s support sagging nationwide, claimed that their supporters had trouble entering the arena, and blamed “radical” protesters and the media.
“Sadly, protesters interfered with supporters, even blocking access to the metal detectors, which prevented people from entering the rally,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign communications director. “Radical protesters, coupled with a relentless onslaught from the media, attempted to frighten off the president’s supporters. We are proud of the thousands who stuck it out.”
But in reality, there were few protests across the city, and black leaders in Tulsa called for people to stay away from the rally. There was also a huge security presence around the arena.
Mr. Trump had originally been scheduled to address an overflow crowd of supporters outside, those plans were also scrapped at the last minute. The campaign did not make it clear why, although the outdoor area was only sparsely populated.
In an interview on Fox News ahead of his rally, Mr. Trump appear to acknowledge that the crowds were not as big as anticipated. “We are, I think we’re going to do really well,” he said. “The campaign is starting. These folks who showed up tonight, they’re amazing people.”
An enthusiastic but smaller-than-expected crowd greeted the president.
In Tulsa, the 19,000-seat BOK Center remained underfilled for President Trump’s first rally in months, with a crowd that was well below the campaign’s expectations.
A planned appearance by Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to an outdoor stage outside the arena, to address what was expected to be an overflow crowd, was canceled, as just dozens of supporters were waiting by the stage at the time the speakers were supposed to arrive.
The Trump campaign blamed protesters interfering with supporters and blocking access to metal detectors for the smaller-than-expected crowd.
Inside the BOK Center, surrogates and Mr. Trump’s supporters took turns ignoring the empty space and seeking to rally the crowd. A local Oklahoma sheriff called Mr. Trump a friend of law enforcement, referencing the national unrest that has broken out over police brutality and racial injustice.
All the trappings of Mr. Trump’s signature rallies were back. Red hats that read “Make America Great Again” greatly outnumbered the amount of masks, even as the event took place during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Trump’s go-to playlist roared from the speakers, with favorites like the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A” and “In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins greeting longtime rally-goers used to hearing their favorite tunes.
However, as Mr. Trump was preparing to take the stage, the floor space in front of the podium remained only about half full, and the top rung of seats at the BOK Center remained largely empty.
Outside the arena, dozens of supporters stood outside as Mr. Trump spoke, listening to snippets of his speech with a handful of protesters holding signs nearby. Soon, dozens more protesters marched through, bearing signs with messages like “Black Lives Matter” and “Go Home Donald.”
The crowd quickly swelled to hundreds of anti-Trump protesters, with both camps forming circles around combatants from both sides as they exchanged heated words. But about 20 minutes later, only one large group remained. One man tried to start an “all lives matter” chant as a man in a Black Lives Matter shirt spoke, but it did not catch on. Within minutes, however, protesters marched through again, and the arguments resumed.
Fact-check: Trump says protesters “were very violent.”
Mr. Trump repeatedly referred to disturbances outside the BOK Center from protesters that he suggested disrupted his supporters trying to enter the rally.
“Look at what happened tonight,” he said. “Law enforcement said, ‘Sir, they can’t be outside, it is too dangerous.’ We had a bunch of maniacs come and sort of attack our city. The mayor, the governor did a great job. But they were very violent. And our people are not nearly as violent, but if they ever were, it would be a terrible, terrible day for the other side.”
This lacks evidence. Reporters for The New York Times and other news organizations at the rally reported there were few protests and clashes with Trump supporters. A journalist for The Los Angeles Times said on Twitter that an entrance was closed briefly but no one was turned away.
Even on the Fox News Channel, coverage leading into Mr. Trump’s rally showed few people milling about outside Tulsa’s BOK Center and noted that there was little interaction between Trump supporters and people protesting his event.
Fact-check: Trump misleads on military spending, Covid-19 testing.
transcript
‘They Test and They Test’: Trump Brushes Off Rise in Covid-19 Cases
President Trump claimed rising numbers of coronavirus cases as states reopen across the country were due to increased testing.
We saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and all we do is get hit on like we’re terrible. And what we’ve done with the ventilators and with the medical equipment and with testing — you know, testing is a double-edged sword. We’ve tested now 25 million people. It’s probably 20 million people more than anybody else. Germany’s done a lot, South Korea’s done a lot — they call me, they said the job you’re doing — here’s the bad part: When you test of — when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please. They test and they test. We had tests that people don’t know what’s going on. We got tests. We got another one over here. The young man’s 10 years old. He’s got the sniffles. He’ll recover in about 15 minutes. That’s a case. Add him to it — that’s OK. That’s a case.
Mr. Trump began his rally with some oft-repeated falsehoods, Linda Qiu reports.
He claimed to have “spent over $2 trillion to completely rebuild the unmatched strength and power of the United States military.”
This is misleading. The $2 trillion figure refers to the defense budgets for the past three fiscal years: $671 billion in 2018, $685 billion in 2019 and $713 billion in 2020. But Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the military needed to be completely rebuilt when he entered office is wrong.
Adjusted for inflation, the Pentagon operated with larger budgets every year from the 2007 fiscal year to 2012 fiscal year, peaking at $848 billion in 2008.
Mr. Trump also wrongly suggested that ramped up testing is why the United States has reported the highest number of cases. “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” he said.
This is false. The United States had conducted more than 26 million tests and recorded more than 2.2 million cases. But this still likely undercounts the scale of the pandemic, and ramped up testing does not account for the high number of cases.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the number of cases is proportional to the number of tests does not hold water. Brazil has the second highest number of cases at over 1 million, but it has conducted 2.4 million tests. Conversely, Russia has conducted 16.7 million tests and reported about 577,000 cases.
Other metrics show that the pandemic is just more severe in the United States than other countries. For example, the United States conducts roughly 21 tests to find one case, whereas Italy, one of the countries hardest and earliest hit by the coronavirus, performs about 188 tests to find a case. Russia has conducted more daily tests on a per-capita basis than the United States, but its share of tests that come back as positive is lower.
Mr. Trump also claimed to have signed the largest tax cuts in history.
This is false. Several other tax cuts rank higher.
Rally workers test positive as Trump supporters gather in Tulsa.
Ahead of President Trump’s rally, his campaign acknowledged that six staff members who were working on the event had tested positive for the virus during routine screening.
“Six members of the advance team tested positive out of hundreds of tests performed, and quarantine procedures were immediately implemented,” said a campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh. “No Covid-positive staffers or anyone in immediate contact will be at today’s rally or near attendees and elected officials.”
“As previously announced, all rally attendees are given temperature checks before going through security, at which point they are given wristbands, face masks and hand sanitizer,” Mr. Murtaugh added.
Mr. Trump, made aware of the infected campaign aides before departing for the rally, was incensed the news was made public, according to two people familiar with his reaction.
In the hours before the rally, cloth masks were handed out to supporters as they filed into a designated area, but wearing them was not enforced. Some people threw masks out immediately after being handed them, and few wore them at the outdoor concert next to the arena.
According to the event’s staff, an attendee who failed a temperature check would be placed in a cooling room and given a second test, to account for the hot weather. If they failed that test, the staff member said, they would not be allowed entry.
Public health officials have warned that these measures would not prevent the spread of a positive case of coronavirus, and would not identify individuals who are asymptomatic carriers. Leaders in Mr. Trump’s administration and campaign have repeatedly dismissed these concerns, and emphasized the importance of an individual person’s right to not wear a mask, if they choose.
Hours before the rally, Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, a Republican, told reporters that he did not believe Mr. Trump’s event would cause a spike in coronavirus deaths in the state.
“We built capacity in our hospitals and our P.P.E., and we have 211 people in the hospital,” Mr. Stitt said. “So my question back to those folks that want people to bunker in place is, like, ‘When is the right time to open back up?’”
Mr. Stitt, speaking to reporters in Tulsa, expressed confidence in the state’s phased reopening that began in late April, and its handling of the pandemic, recent protests and the preparations for the rally.
“The goal was never to have zero cases,” Mr. Stitt said. “And so these other states that are sitting here, do they think they’re going to have zero cases in August or September or October or November?”
Oklahoma reported a record number of new virus cases on Thursday, with 450, and 352 new positive tests on Friday.
Mr. Stitt said he had several conversations in recent days with Mr. Trump. Asked if the president told him why he selected Tulsa, Mr. Stitt said, “Some of the reasons he chose here was because of the good data that we had, because we were one of the first states to reopen. He just wanted to highlight that.”
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, has declined to hold large events out of concern that they could further spread the virus.
‘I will not live in fear.’ Most rally-goers decline to wear masks.
Following a relatively quiet night in Tulsa, Trump supporters assembled on Saturday near the BOK Center, where President Trump is scheduled to hold his evening rally, adding to the crowd that had spent days camping in lawn chairs and tents in a line that stretched for several blocks.
The mood among many supporters was exuberant as they awaited the president’s return to the campaign trail after months without rallies amid the coronavirus outbreak. Some attendees already knew each other from previous Trump events and reunited with old friends. Others played music or struck up chants of “four more years!”
A few hundred supporters gathered Saturday morning at Fourth and Cheyenne, the first rally checkpoint, about two blocks from the arena. A majority of them wore red Make America Great Again hats, while others had on hats with patriotic emblems or colors. Some waved red, white and blue banners with the Trump 2020 logo, the American flag or the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.
Almost none wore masks.
“If it is God’s will that I get coronavirus, that is the will of the Almighty,” said Robert Montanelli, a resident of a Tulsa suburb who chose not to wear a mask. “I will not live in fear.”
Angela, a Tulsa city employee who refused to give her last name, also said she did not want to wear a mask. “I am a healthy young woman,” she said. She compared coronavirus to the flu.
Mike Pellerin, from Austin, Texas, wore a T-shirt saying, “Are we dead yet?” “I am 68,” he said proudly. “I don’t feel sick. I don’t have the virus. I’m not going to give it to anyone.”
Just before noon on Saturday, the police arrested a woman in an “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt outside the BOK Center, The Tulsa World reported. The woman, Sheila Buck, who lives in the city, said she had a ticket to the rally and was arrested for trespassing.
Black leaders in Tulsa called for the mayor to cancel Trump’s rally.
Just hours before President Trump’s rally was set to begin in Tulsa, local black leaders held a news conference in the city’s Greenwood neighborhood pleading with the mayor to cancel the event.
The community members, who included religious leaders and civil rights activists, stood in front of the memorial dedicated to the victims of the massacre of black Tulsans by a white mob in 1921.
Invoking the tragedy, they argued that the rally would wound a city that has worked hard at creating a shared language of racial reconciliation. They also said the city’s black community may bear the brunt of a coronavirus resurgence, if the rally helps increase infections in the area.
“It is purposeful that this moment is happening to Tulsa right now,” said Greg Robinson II, a progressive activist who is running for mayor.
The leaders’ focus on the mayor, G.T. Bynum, is intentional. Mr. Bynum, a Republican, has tried to cast himself as a friend of the city’s black community. He also said this week that the city was “honored’’ to be hosting Mr. Trump’s rally.
Pastor Robert Turner of the Vernon A.M.E. church on Greenwood Avenue, one of the only structures still standing from 1921, said he understood the chances that the mayor would cancel the rally were slim. But he said the leaders sought to pressure Mr. Bynum to “stand up the president.”
“This is more about scoring political points with this president than the health of their citizens,” Mr. Turner said.
On Saturday, Jack Graham, an aide to Mayor Bynum, formally resigned from his position in a letter he posted on Twitter.
Mr. Graham, who is white, wrote that he could no longer support the mayor and his decisions. Mr. Graham worked for the city for 13 months in an entry-level position, according to Michelle Brooks, a spokeswoman for the mayor. It is unclear which decisions Mr. Graham was referring to in the letter. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
On Saturday, the twin sister of a man shot and killed by a police officer in 2016 said Mr. Trump’s visit to the city was an affront to her family and to the memory of the hundreds of African-Americans who died in the 1921 riot.
In 2016, a police officer shot and killed her brother Terence Crutcher, 40, a black motorist who was walking away from his vehicle with his hands up. The confrontation was captured on video, and led to the officer, Betty Jo Shelby, being charged with first-degree manslaughter in the death of Mr. Crutcher.
Officer Shelby was later found not guilty of manslaughter.
Tiffany Crutcher, Mr. Crutcher’s sister, said in an interview that she and her brothers are descendants of a survivor of the 1921 massacre, Rebecca Brown Crutcher.
“As an African-American and a descendant of the survivor of the worst domestic terror act against black people, it’s a slap in the face,” Ms. Crutcher said of Mr. Trump’s visit, as she sat at the Vernon A.M.E. church. “We know the residual effects that come out of his rallies — the rhetoric, the spew, the hate, the bigotry. All of those things are simply a recipe for a disaster for Tulsa, Oklahoma.”
Later on Saturday, about 400 people gathered at Tulsa’s Veteran’s Park as a counter to the Trump appearance. Air Force One flew over as the participants gathered, eliciting boos.
“For someone to bring that clown car of hate into Tulsa is wrong,” said one speaker, David Bragg-Sutton. “We must have peace.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks are scheduled to come one day after the Juneteenth holiday, which celebrates the abolition of slavery in the United States. The rally was originally scheduled to fall on the holiday, but Mr. Trump moved it to Saturday after public pressure and quiet lobbying.
Minnesota lawmakers failed to compromise on police overhaul measures.
Political leaders in Minnesota promised sweeping reforms after George Floyd’s killing turned their state into a focal point for nationwide fury and grief over police killings and racism.
But those efforts collapsed early on Saturday as leaders in the Minnesota Legislature — the only one in the country where Democrats control one chamber and Republicans the other — failed to compromise on a package of law-enforcement reform measures before a special session ended.
Ultimately, legislators could not come to an agreement that reconciled the Democrats’ calls for far-reaching changes to police oversight with Republicans’ efforts to pass a shorter list of “common-sense police reforms,” which included banning chokeholds in most situations and requiring officers to stop their colleagues from using unreasonable force.
Democrats said the Republicans’ plan consisted of tepid half-steps that were already in place in most law-enforcement agencies and did not rise to the moment’s calls for dramatic action. Republicans balked at Democratic proposals to restore voter rights to tens of thousands of felons and put the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, in charge of prosecuting police killings.
Democrats in the House shared a late counteroffer, dropping those demands. And Republican leaders said they had agreed to alter arbitration proceedings when officers are accused of misconduct.
But as the clock ticked toward a midnight deadline on Friday — and then far past it — leaders of both parties blamed each other for failing to reach a compromise. The breakdown finally came just after 6 a.m. on Saturday, when both chambers adjourned without a deal.
The Legislature’s failure to pass a bill was a disheartening turn for activists who have pushed for far-reaching changes to policing, including cutting police budgets or dismantling police departments altogether to reduce the presence of armed officers in minority neighborhoods.
Some lawmakers said they hoped that Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, would call them back again next week or later in the summer to take up the issues, but activists worried that the window to change the laws was closing as the 2020 election approaches.
In Colorado on Friday, Gov. Jared Polis signed into law a bill to remove the shield of legal immunity that has long protected police officers from civil suits for on-the-job misconduct, a measure civil libertarians hailed as landmark legislation.
The Colorado state legislature passed the bill last week.
Mr. Polis, a first-term Democrat, took the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth, celebrating the abolition of slavery in the United States, to formally enact the law.
Two people were shot in Seattle’s ‘autonomous zone.’
Part of a Seattle neighborhood overtaken by protesters was the scene of a shooting Saturday that left one person dead and another wounded, officials said.
The shooting unfolded early Saturday morning near the main entrance of a protester-run area that has been celebrated as a “no cop” zone. Last week, the Seattle Police Department made the unusual decision to abandon a police station in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, board up the windows and let protesters have free rein outside, in the wake of demonstrations nationwide over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Protesters took over several city blocks, named it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and put up a banner on the front entrance of the now-empty station reading, “This space is now property of the Seattle people.” The zone, with the atmosphere of a street festival or commune, drew the ire of President Trump, who called on Twitter for officials to crack down on protesters and declared that “Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle.”
The authorities said the victim who died was a 19-year-old man, and the person wounded was a man of unknown age who was being treated for life-threatening injuries.
The Seattle police said in a statement that the shooting occurred inside the protest zone. Officers responded to a report of shots fired at about 2:30 a.m. in Cal Anderson Park, inside the autonomous zone, which is also being called the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (C.H.O.P.) area.
“Officers attempted to locate a shooting victim but were met by a violent crowd that prevented officers’ safe access to the victims,” the police statement said. The police later said that they had been informed that the two men had been transported to the hospital by protest-zone medics.
The suspect or suspects had fled, they said, and the motive behind the shooting was not known.
The police acknowledged the unusual circumstances of conducting a homicide investigation in a no-police zone, writing in their statement that detectives are “conducting a thorough investigation, despite the challenges presented by the circumstances.”
Videos taken at the scene and posted on social media by Converge Media showed the volunteer medics racing through crowds of onlookers in the pre-dawn darkness.
As armed police officers in riot gear entered the zone, people screamed, “The victim left the premises!”
Tensions were high as some protesters appeared to object to the entry of the police. At one point, protesters briefly surrounded a police car and then yelled, as the vehicle sped away, “Whose streets? Our streets!”
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington said on Saturday that he was saddened to hear of the shooting, but he said it was clear that the government needed to be able to provide protection for all citizens, including in that zone.
“We have to have a way to provide police services and fire services in that area,” Mr. Inslee said.
Reporting was contributed by Maggie Astor, Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Shaila Dewan, John Eligon, Reid Epstein, Richard Fausset, Ben Fenwick, Manny Fernandez, Katie Glueck, Maggie Haberman, Jack Healy, Astead Herndon, Jonathan Martin, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Linda Qiu, Reid Epstein and Campbell Robertson.
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