President Donald Trump, who has been eager to return to the campaign trail, finally got his wish Saturday night to be reunited with the MAGA faithful. Team Trump anticipated crowds so large that the campaign even booked a second outdoor venue, where Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were supposed to speak to the overflow crowd outdoors. But the Tulsa mega-rally that his aides had promised him—one for which his campaign claimed more than a million people requested tickets—was nowhere to be found yesterday in the 19,000-seat BOK Center, which the New York Times reported to be at least one-third empty during the event.
Given the lack of turnout, the overflow space went unused, with both Trump and Pence canceling their outdoor remarks—something that the campaign attributed to “radical protestors, coupled with a relentless onslaught from the media, [attempting] to frighten off the President’s supporters.” Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh claimed “protestors interfered with supporters, even blocking the metal detectors, which prevented people from entering the rally”—despite reports of few protests across the city and ample security presence around the arena—and noted that Team Trump was “proud of the thousands who stuck it out.”
Hundreds of teens reportedly grabbed free tickets to prank the campaign, with the Times noting that TikTok users and fan accounts of Korean pop music groups had “claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets” for the rally. But even if this inflated expectations, a third of an arena empty in the heart of Trump country was nevertheless a surprising sight.
Trump, addressing the COVID-19 crisis that has killed 120,000 Americans and counting, likened coronavirus to “sniffles” and, at one point, used the racist term “Kung flu,” language one of his own top White House advisers called “highly offensive” in March. He referred to COVID-19 testing as a “double-edged sword” given that doing so will uncover more cases. “So I said to my people, slow the testing down please.”
The White House later claimed Trump was joking. “He was obviously kidding,” one official told reporters. Similarly, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro dismissed Trump’s alarming remarks Sunday on CNN as “tongue in cheek” and a “light moment.”
But Trump’s comments Saturday night are not so far off from what he’s said in the past, with the president reportedly fearing in March that increased testing could hurt his reelection campaign by exposing a larger number of confirmed cases in the country and thus undercutting his lax response to the threat. And on Monday, Trump again mused that testing was making the country look bad and that “if we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” The Times notes that, like the man they were there to support, many of the thousands who showed up to the rally on Saturday did not practice social distancing or wear masks. The president was reportedly furious to hear that the news of six campaign staffers testing positive before the event had gotten out to the public.