Camera crews, musical acts planned at rally
President Donald Trump's re-election campaign is going all-in on its preparation for the campaign rally in Tulsa on Saturday, bringing in musical acts, and flying in high-profile surrogates and camera crews to showcase the president's support, according to Trump campaign spokeswoman Samantha Zager.
The plan, first reported by Axios, includes leasing a jet to fly in prominent campaign supporters like "Black Voices for Trump" Advisory Board members. Dozens of lawmakers including Oklahoma Republican Sens. Jim Inhofe and James Lankford also will campaign for the president.
The campaign said Wednesday evening more than a million people had signed up online to attend the event, and while the rally location, the BOK Center in Tulsa, can only hold 19,000 people, the campaign is arranging overflow capacity and will be harvesting voter data from all of the registrations.
Trump also plans to address crowds both inside the BOK Center and at stages set up outside.
The Trump campaign has faced some criticism for its holding of a rally amid the coronavirus pandemic. Lankford urged people with underlying health conditions not to attend, and said everyone at the rally should be wearing masks.
The campaign plans to distribute masks and hand sanitizer at the event, and temperature checks will be conducted.
The Trump campaign moved the rally back by one day after facing pushback for its original selection of June 19, or Juneteenth, which commemorates the date in 1865 slaves in Texas finally learned they had been freed two and one- half years earlier
by the Emancipation Proclamation.
Critics of the original rally date noted the city's 1921 race massacre and criticized the selection
amid nationwide protests over racial discrimination and police brutality.
Oklahoma marked its largest single- day
increase in coronavirus cases this week, reporting 228 new cases Tuesday, and many of the new cases are attributable to Tulsa County, the rally site.
Local health officials have called for the event to be canceled, and Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said at a Wednesday press conference he would not be attending the event and would instead be greeting Trump at the airport.