As 2020 nears halfway mark, Trump presides over a country in worst turmoil since 1968

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But because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the usually rowdy Democratic Party’s nomination contest suddenly came to a strange anticlimax. Following former Vice President Joe Biden’s wins in several multi-state primary days against his chief opponent, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the air increasingly went out of the Sanders insurgency just as state-by-state stay-in-place shutdowns were kicking in, making it nearly impossible to campaign in the usual fashion. This helped let the air out of the Sanders balloon, even in the face of fervent enthusiasm by his supporters. That took the heart out of any real possibility of a winning insurgent Sanders candidacy — or any from any other candidate — in place of Biden. In fact, endorsements by a number of leading black Democrats as well as Biden’s deep veins of support among African Americans and older voters proved telling in the end. 

Surprisingly, the remaining primaries have proved to be kind of an afterthought or even a rubber stamp, after every other would-be nominee decided to endorse Biden publicly. For several of the other candidates, those endorsements might have been an agile way to position themselves as potential vice presidential nominees. For others, it was a recognition that any further infighting among Democrats was only going to help the chances of Donald Trump’s re-election. Yet for others, it was a recognition that their campaigns had simply run out of cash and so it would be better to stay inside the party’s tent and try to influence party platform provisions than keep fighting in a definitively losing battle. For this latter rationale, read the name Sanders of course.  

But the Trump re-election machine, despite having amassed an astounding hoard of cash for the upcoming campaign, has found itself bound, hand and foot, by the Covid-19 virus, with the only real possibilities for using this mountain of money being the online world. The strong suit of the monster rallies he so loves — something like a Trumpian version of a Nuremberg rally — has been out of bounds as well for the past three months.

This past weekend, however, the Trump campaign finally put the machinery in motion in Tulsa, Oklahoma for one of his monster rallies on 19 June 2020. According to Trump campaign sources, something like a million people had registered for the event and around 20,000 people were supposed to attend inside the Bok Center in Tulsa, while many thousands more were supposed to cluster together just outside the venue. 

While the campaign said it was going to hand out hand sanitiser and face masks in deference to the realities of the still-pervasive pandemic, virtually every public health specialist in and out of government weighed in to call such an event a kind of giant petri dish to hot-house a new round of Covid-19 infections — and then vectors the infected clear across the nation as attendees return to their homes around the US. 

Oklahoma, itself, meanwhile, was, in the face of a rollback of much of the earlier shutdown, and was already registering a major spike in Covid-19 exposure. Even without the spike that will eventuate from Trump’s rally, the actual infection rate and severe cases in Oklahoma are almost certain to rise. A real question, of course, will be how the blame for this rise will then be apportioned several weeks after the rally, once the number of cases becomes clearer. Nationally, by the actual day of Trump’s rally, the national death toll had already reached nearly 120,000 people, while the total case number was more than 2.25 million — and rising.

Meanwhile, of course, the Trump campaign, and the candidate, ran into yet another provocative angle emanating from the still-ongoing protests and demonstrations stemming from the anger about the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman. Such specific protests have merged with the anger and enthusiasm of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. And that stream, in turn, has now come together with calls for reform of policing and still wider protests over racial injustice — both nationally and internationally. 

As things would have it, the Trump team managed to stumble over not one but two radioactive boulders by picking Tulsa for their rally on 19 June 2020. These were, of course, in addition to the campaign’s more obvious cocking a snook at efforts to cope with the viral infection.

In an obliviousness to virtually every aspect of African American life and history (and thus black voters as well), the Trump campaign managed to stumble over the fact that they had scheduled their rally for Tulsa – the scene of the deliberate destruction of the city’s Greenwood neighbourhood, the so-called “Black Wall Street”, 99 years ago on 31 May 1921, as white residents burned down virtually the entire district, killing many of the inhabitants in the melee, and rendering the inhabitants destitute. 

But if that were not enough, they scheduled the rally on the same day as the historic Juneteenth anniversary. Juneteenth is the date of the final, conclusive end to slavery in America, when federal troops finally reached Galveston, Texas and formally announced the end of slavery, fulfilling the promise of President Abraham Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” that had been issued at the beginning of 1862. While the proclamation was a statement of intent, the Civil War still had three-and-a-half years to run before emancipation from slavery were more than words for most. The antagonism over picking this date has brought attention to these two anniversaries and, besides everything else, it has given some heft to the burgeoning call to make Juneteenth a national holiday.

Given Trump’s words and deeds to date, on the part of many, perhaps most, black Americans (and many whites as well) it was something of a sacrilege about the meaning of the Juneteenth commemoration to pick that date for the reboot of the Trump monster rally season. In discussing the choice of venue and date, Trump had inevitably added insult to injury when he explained nobody he knew had even mentioned to him the meaning of Juneteenth, and he had never heard about it before anyway. Therefore it didn’t matter. And besides, he’s been the best president ever for minorities because of the brilliant economy he had built all by himself, that is, at least until that evil Chinese virus had so spoiled things for everybody with economic growth and the stock markets.