GOP SENATORS UP FOR RE-ELECTION, DON’T WANT TO BE SEEN WITH TRUMP

…A picture that tells it all about Trump’s Tulsa rally

Trump expected many thousands in Tulsa, got less that 10,000 attendees

President Trump spoke at a campaign rally Saturday night in Tulsa.  Just a mile away from the location of the nation’s worst massacre of an estimated 300 Negros by white Oklahoman's, 99 years ago.

Trump threatened violence against the protesters, he endangered his supporters by flouting health recommendations and as he endured a 110-day, coronavirus-induced national dry spell.  But when President Trump finally stepped back onto his rally stage Saturday night in Tulsa, he saw a sea of empty blue seats.  He always said his rallies were bigger than they actually were.  But this time, it was obvious that his first rally after moths of being absent, was a bust that even he couldn’t deny.

The thousands of empty arena chairs, after his campaign had over-hyped about his expected overflow crowds and ticket requests he had falsely boasted were totaling more than 1 million.  The reality just symbolized the beleaguered state of Trump’s presidency and of his quest to win a second term.

The planned outside Trump event before the rally had to be cancelled.  They falsely said it was because of the “Black Lives Mater” protestors crowd.  But the truth was that no Trump supporters showed up for the outside event.  And the size of the protestor crowd was equal to or larger than the inside Trump supporters, and they were protesting all around the stadium where the rally was eventually held.

To a nation broken by a pandemic and a growing number of casualties plus a national recession, all the while with a racial justice movement roiling thousands of communities across the country, Trump offered no reconciliation for the protesters only disdain for their quest.

Instead, he tried and failed to put up a real fight.

Trump as expected, belittled the seriousness of the coronavirus, as he mocked health experts and recalled, “I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down,’ ” because as more tests are conducted, more infections are discovered.

Our idiot president seemed to think that an average American didn’t have the ability to know how stupid that suggestion was, actually. 

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With cities coast to coast pulsating in protest of the recent racial injustice, Trump used his bully pulpit to exacerbate the chaos in his hopes of utilizing the nation’s difficult times.  He condemned what he called “this cruel campaign of censorship” in his reference to the debate over removing monuments and memorials to Confederate generals.  He declared: “They want to demolish our heritage. . . . We have a great heritage. We’re a great country.”   He apparently wants to keep the monuments that were originally built during the 20’s and 40’s.  Those years of “Jim Crow rules” to denigrate the concept of the black race being equal to the white race.

Trump’s rallies have long been singular events in American politics.  But rarely have so many currents charging through the country converged as they did Saturday at the site of the rally in Tulsa. The president’s appearance in Oklahoma, where coronavirus cases have surged and local officials have discouraged mass gatherings, was itself a Trump act of defiance.

The picture of a single supporter sitting alone in the top section of the giant arena on Saturday in Tulsa, said it all about the failure of the event.

Trump’s performance masked the reality of a presidency in peril. This past week alone, the Supreme Court twice ruled against Trump’s administration, including on one of its signature immigration policies. It became known from the former his former National Security Adviser that Trump had sought election help with his re-election efforts from Chinese President Xi Jinping.  In addition, that Trump’s firing of a US attorney who had been investigating his associates also drew loud condemnations.  And Trump has yet to present a comprehensive governing plan to end the  Covid-19 pandemic, and to provide long-term relief for the millions of people who are unemployed, or to address the current growing civil rights movements with any significant action.

Falling further behind in all of the polls and being bruised by his own bouts of self-sabotage, Trump planned to show onstage in Tulsa how he intends to fight for a second term.

If Trump had settled on a new message for this relaunch phase of his campaign, it was difficult to determine what the message was…..?   His 101-minute address was just more than usual rambling and it lacked any coordinated thinking.  It ranged from some of his favorite hits, such as his attacks on CNN and the “fake news media,” to the dark imagery about “Joe Biden’s America.”   The dialog was more about rioters and looters and it went into a lengthy monologue trying to explaining his slow and unsteady walk down a ramp, and his strange, very nervous two-handed sip of water he had last weekend at the West Point Academy.  Trump failed at trying to defend his awkward slow walk down the West Point ramp, as he seriously looked at West Point like someone that was not in control of his physical or mental actions.

Yes, walking down that ramp he looked like someone that was wasn’t mentally all together.

At his rally, the president tried to spin an alternate reality of the national crises over which he presides.  In Trump’s telling, he has been the victim against dangerous villains old and new. He portrayed the Democratic nominee Biden as a hapless captive to “the left-wing mob,” all the while he was sounding like a “right wing Mobster Don.”

Trump basked in the raucous, mask-free adulation of the few thousands of supporters, some of whom had traveled long distances to take in the show.  This is even though the crowd filled many less than half of an arena that could hold 19,000 fans.  The Tulsa Fire Dept said 6,200 people had attended, Trump’s people said it was twice that amount.  

Who are you going to believe?

The campaign had built that second stage for Trump to address an expected overflow crowd of thousands.  But having no Trump attendees, the speech there was totally scrapped, and local workers quickly got to dismantling the outdoor stage.

Relative to the campaign’s expectations, this was a total humiliation that Trump unjustly blamed on the protesters.

This was all after Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale had touted that more than 1 million people had requested tickets to the Tulsa rally.  Trump told reporters on Monday: “We expect to have, you know, it’s like a record-setting crowd. We’ve never had an empty seat. And we certainly won’t in Oklahoma.”   Just one more less than honest statement from the president.

The general election campaign now has an inflection point.  With 4½ months until Election Day, Trump is trying to press a reset button, as some advisers have described it. The president has resumed large-scale campaigning despite the pleadings of public health officials for people to avoid such gatherings.

Biden, meanwhile, plans to continue campaigning largely through live-stream technology in accordance with social distancing recommendations. The former vice president only recently returned to having in-person events at all and he requires attendees to wear masks, which Trump himself refuses.

Attendees at the Tulsa event, had to first agree to forgo the right to sue the Trump campaign if they became infected with the virus.  They were given masks, but they were not required to wear them.

With polls showing Biden very far ahead — including a Fox News Channel national survey just released last Thursday that had Biden leading Trump 50% to 38%.   Trump even tried to show off one of his assets that his opponent lacks: “The ability to turn out a crowd”. Massive, rowdy rallies are part of Trump’s political DNA, and, as he and his advisers see it, give him an edge against Biden, who in normal times during the final stretch of the primary season drew smaller crowds.

“Rallies have been the lifeblood of the Trump campaign,” said Corey Lewandowski, an outside adviser to the president who managed his 2016 campaign. “It’s an opportunity for him to deliver a message not only to the audience there but nationally, in an unfettered way.”

Trump’s rallies have long been opportunities for him to vent his grievances and let off lots of steam. His last rally was March 2 in Charlotte, shortly before much of the country shut down because of the virus. And after more than three months largely confined to the White House, his confidants inside and outside the government said taking the stage in Tulsa provided Trump with a needed release.

“The president is going stir-crazy,” said a former senior administration official who, like most of the other people interviewed for this story, they spoke on the condition of anonymity. “In addition to the normal grievances over how he’s portrayed in the press and how coronavirus is unfair to him and the race riots are unfair to him, it’s all been intensified and magnified by being cooped up.”

Biden has called Trump reckless for hitting the campaign trail even as the virus continues to spread.

“Now he’s just flat surrendering the fight” against the pandemic, Biden said Wednesday in Darby, Pa. “Instead of leading the charge to defeat the virus, he just basically waved a white flag and has retreated. He’s so eager to get back on his campaign, to his campaign rallies, that he’ll put people at risk.”

Other Democrats said Trump’s rally performances, long marked by his glorification of political violence and race-baiting, are insensitive and counterproductive at a moment when the nation needs healing and unity.

Several advisers to embattled Republican senators up for reelection said privately this past week that they are struggling to balance what they see as an electoral imperative to demonstrate independence from the president.

“It’s a terrible situation,” said one of these Republican strategists, who said one solution is for candidates to give speeches before the president arrives to avoid being photographed together. “If you’re onstage in a MAGA hat smiling wide, the Democrats will make it an ad in a second.”

Former Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a Trump critic, said: “The decision they will all have to make is, when he comes, will you go onstage? You go and you’re with him. You don’t go and you might not seem genuine to many Republicans.”

Trump told reporters earlier this month that he would resume regular campaigning, with events planned for Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Texas, in addition to this Oklahoma fiasco, though no other rallies have yet been publicly announced.

The president will travel to Phoenix on Tuesday for an event spotlighting youth supporters, but it is not a campaign rally. This is despite the uptick in coronavirus cases in Arizona.

Joe Arpaio, the longtime former sheriff of Maricopa County in the Phoenix area who received a pardon for criminal contempt charges from Trump in 2017, said “I praise his courage” to be willing to fly around the country holding rallies during a serious pandemic.  “If people don’t want to go, they don’t have to go,” said Arpaio, an early backer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. “. . . People can take care of themselves. I think he has a lot of courage to do these rallies. He’s not hiding, staying locked up in home arrest. He’s out there fighting for his country.”

Trump’s aides said there is an ongoing discussion that verges on a debate among the political team about how to hold rallies this summer and whether to stage them at open-air venues, such as airport tarmacs or hangars, or indoor arenas, whose stadium-style seating makes crowds appear swelling and raucous on television.

Another point of tension is the choice of locations, with some Trump aides wanting to send the president only to battleground states and others keen to venture into reliably Republican states such as Oklahoma, where he can draw a big crowd and galvanize his base.  But after Tulsa, can he?

Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R), a conservative activist and Trump backer, said people in states such as his that are often overlooked by presidential campaigns would “erupt with joy” at the chance to see Trump perform in person.  “Only Elvis himself could match his ability to draw a crowd in Mississippi,” McDaniel said.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has considerable influence over the president’s travel schedule and rally site selection and is the one who talks through possibilities with Trump and executes whatever the president ends up deciding.  This is according to people familiar with the internal dynamics.

“In the past, presidents did Oval Office addresses and Franklin Roosevelt had fireside chats. Donald Trump is the master of the campaign rally. It’s his bully pulpit. He feeds off that energy,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chairman of Newsmax and a Trump friend. He described the president as “anxious to get back on the road.”

If the future rallies are similar to Tulsa, those rallies could be cancelled or severely changed for smaller venues.

Copyright G. Ater 2020