Trump’s hubris, unmasked
At least the Trump campaign had the sense to shift the date of its Tulsa, Okla., rally so that it did not directly coincide with Juneteenth, the anniversary of the freeing of slaves in 1865. It would have been beyond insensitive for a president who has sowed so much racial division to hold his reelection rally on that sacred day in a city that experienced one of the worst racist massacres in American history in 1921.
A rally expected to pack 19,000 supporters into an indoor arena, now set for Saturday, remains a horrible idea in a city enduring a spike of infections in the deadliest pandemic in a century.
Attendees will be issued masks, but will not be required to wear them. Each will be given hand sanitizer, but social distancing will be impossible at the BOK Center. What could go wrong? Plenty. Tulsa’s top health official, Bruce Dart, said at a news conference this week that he was absolutely worried that the rally would become a “super spreader” event that would lead to more deaths.
Trump is clearly one of the Americans in denial of the science even as coronavirus infections surge in a number of states, including Oklahoma. His insistence on holding this rally in defiance of CDC guidelines is either a demonstration of his ignorance or his utter disinterest in the wellbeing of his followers. Or both. Even after shifting its date, the Trump rally’s confluence with the Juneteenth weekend is raising objections, and all the more so after the president boorishly told the Wall Street Journal “nobody had ever heard of ” the holiday and he deserved credit because “I made Juneteenth very famous.”
Does anyone seriously expect Trump to strike anything but a selfcongratulatory tone about race relations when he appears before a raucous, adoring crowd? Does anyone think he might acknowledge his own role in stirring racial animosities — and see fit to apologize for transgressions such as spreading conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace, denouncing NFL players who protested racial injustice during the National Anthem as “sons of bitches” who should be banished from the field and more recently invoking the image of “vicious dogs” attacking protesters and the saying from the racist playbook, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”?
But this president doesn’t do contrition. His shtick, his very political survival, is built on us versus them. And there is no doubt about who is “us” and who is “them.” The latter is drastically underrepresented in his administration and his rally crowds.
It’s telling that Trump acknowledged to the WSJ that neither he nor anyone he polled on staff had heard of Juneteenth; finally, a black Secret Service agent filled him in.
Surely even this White House of little diversity and dubious competence should have discovered the significance of Tulsa or June 19 before scheduling the rally. The 1921 Tulsa massacre performed by white mobs on a prosperous neighborhood known as Black Wall Street claimed an estimated 300 lives and burned more than 1,200 homes and many blackowned businesses. June 19, 1865 is commemorated as the day a general read Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, the last state to free the slaves.
The nation is engaged in a painful reckoning about the systemic racism that neither Trump, his attorney general nor anyone else in the top levels of his administration has acknowledged. The coronavirus pandemic has claimed 118,000 lives in the U.S. and counting.
And the president is too proud to wear a mask or even ask his fervent supporters to do so. Instead, they are being asked to agree to a liability waiver before entering the rally.
It’s come to this, Americans: Trump is telling you to support him at your own risk. Unfortunately, we’re realizing that risk every day.