Trump's Tulsa Rally Highlights His Record of Racial Division
After months off the campaign trail, President Trump will re-launch his re-election bid Saturday night before a boisterous crowd. More than 800,000 supporters registered for tickets, according to his campaign manager. Many have been camped out outside the arena for days. Yet long before they arrived, the rally was enveloped in controversy because of the timing and location.
It’s one thing to cram 19,000 people into an indoor arena in the midst of a pandemic—without mandating the use of masks. It’s another to schedule the event for June 19, a date used to commemorate the delayed emancipation of American slaves, and to pick a location seven blocks from the site of the infamous 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Okla., when white rioters, aided by Tulsa police and the Oklahoma National Guard, looted and burned more than 1,200 black homes and businesses, killing an estimated 300 people.
In the midst of a national reckoning over systemic racism. Trump’s campaign selected one of the most controversial locations and dates it could have chosen. At best, holding the rally in Tulsa once again revealed the massive blind spot Trump and his aides have when it comes to race in America. At worst, it was a deliberate provocation by a campaign and a candidate that seems determined to press on the nation’s raw nerves and deepen racial divisions as a matter of strategy.
Tulsa was chosen because it is in “America’s Heartland” and there’s “no better place” to restart the rallies, said Michael Glassner, the Trump campaign’s chief operating officer. Trump himself told the Wall Street Journal that the rally was pushed back a day after a Black Secret Service agent explained the meaning of the Juneteenth holiday to him. Trump told the Journal that he “did something good” and made Juneteenth “very famous.”
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