FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Analysis: What empty seats in Tulsa tell us about Trump 2020

Analysis: What empty seats in Tulsa tell us about Trump 2020

TULSA, Okla. - The omens started early Saturday morning, before the gates to the "Great American Comeback" rally were opened. I got downtown later than I'd wanted to, making a detour to buy a poncho, after weather forecasts suggested a chance of rain. Shortly after 9 a.m., I started looking for parking, and two Tulsans who were charging $30 for a space politely said I might want to drive around before paying. 

"I thought we'd be full by now," one of the sellers said, "based on the news."

One minute later, I found free street parking and began walking to the BOK Center. Eight hours later, President Donald Trump's campaign was dramatically downscaling its first rally since March, striking a stage at an overflow section as a few dozen supporters mingled in a space designed for thousands. The rain never came. Neither did the expected audience.

Saturday's rally in Tulsa was, on the campaign's own terms, a debacle - a meticulously organized and well-protected event that left thousands of seats unfilled in an arena once sold out by Nickelback. The president himself had predicted a "record-setting crowd," tweeting as the number of online ticket requests surged to Coachella proportions - 300,000, 600,000, 1 million.

"We've never had an empty seat, and we certainly won't in Oklahoma," Trump had said.

That hubris overshadowed what might have been landmark event, the first campaign rally of any kind since March and the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The audience was still larger than any Joe Biden had drawn before securing the Democratic nomination. And the hours of programming clarified how Trump would run against Biden - a message that partly relied on massive rallies.

"Would anybody sleep on the ground overnight waiting to see Joe Biden?" asked Lara Trump, a presidential daughter-in-law and key campaign surrogate, as thousands of supporters laughed and cheered.

There was plenty to learn and see on the ground. Here's what mattered.

- - -

Covid-19 wasn't a joke

The first speculation about how this rally might go centered on the risk of coronavirus infections and the wisdom of gathering thousands of people inside when nearly every large indoor gathering in the country had been canceled. (The BOK Center has no other events planned until July 30.) Would the president's most ardent supporters follow his lead and dismiss the threat of spreading the coronavirus?

The answer was mixed. The campaign itself took some precautions, though it did not enforce mask-wearing inside the arena. Entering the rally, attendees were offered face masks if they did not already have them and given quick temperature checks by staffers in blue protective ponchos. In Oklahoma, where restaurants and other businesses do not require masks, it was a substantial safety investment.

Rallygoers were also divided on how seriously to take the virus. A few of them made jokes about it, but plenty of them said that the threat of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, was real and that they would take precautions. This shouldn't have been a surprise: A Fox News poll released before the rally found that 68% of Republicans, and 61% of Trump supporters specifically, approved of wearing face masks. The president's all-is-well rhetoric had shaped opinions among his most loyal supporters, but many of them appreciated the sentiment without embracing it.

David Edmundson, 61, came to the rally from Dallas to distribute 41,000 plastic face shields - to Trump supporters or anyone who wanted them. He'd given some to Black Lives Matter protesters, he said, but for fans of the president, he needed to hone his pitch. 

"It'll keep the Democrats' b.s. away from you!" Edmundson joked as he stood near the main entrance. "You have a lot of people who think the press is just trying to hype the virus up. So you've got to have a shtick to entice them."

- - -

Security was overwhelming, and part of the show

Every presidential rally requires intense police protection, but the scene in Tulsa went far beyond that - a display of force that blanketed much of the city's downtown. Hundreds of National Guard members, and many more police officers, stood by concrete barriers to guide supporters, guests and reporters to far-apart rally entrances.

They were welcomed as heroes. Trump supporters cheered and took photos with the security teams, sometimes offering them water or food, even as the security zone (which expanded during the day) forced them to circumnavigate long city blocks. In interviews, some attendees said they wanted to defend the police from the abuse they saw from protesters, while some went further, saying police were protecting them from the sporadic clashes and property destruction they had heard about in other cities.

"There's going to be more and more incidents of violence, when Black Lives Matter comes out," said Don Carrillo, 62, who said Trump supporters would be ready if protesters picked a fight. "I don't think these antifa or Black Lives Matter want to mess with a retired Marine. It's going to end badly for them." While there were moments of real tension, there was no violence on the streets of Tulsa; a Black Lives Matter march ended, without incident, with a party in the historically black Greenwood neighborhood.

The rhetoric about protesters was often contradictory, as Trump supporters whose merchandise mocked "snowflakes" and "safe spaces" fretted about Black Lives Matter protests kept away from them by barricades and armored vehicles. Some said they would leave before dark, citing reports of protests and looting they'd seen in other cities. After a protester was told to leave and then arrested inside the gates of the rally, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said he did not know the details but that violence (which had not occurred) would be handled by security.

"If there's starting to be something where they are going to be damaging to other people's property, that's where our law enforcement is going to draw the line," Stitt said. "We've had peaceful protest for the last two weeks in Oklahoma, and we haven't seen what you're seeing on television in other states."

As it became clear that the turnout would miss expectations, the president and the Trump campaign blamed protesters. "We had some very bad people outside," Trump said on the BOK Center's stage. "They were doing some bad things." Protesters had blocked only one of three gates for a short period of time, and it's possible that inflating of the threat from protesters persuaded some supporters to stay home.

- - -

The base is being reined in, at least on television. When they approached the main gate of the rally, Trump supporters saw a billboard laying out the rules. Campaign buttons were prohibited, as were any signs; "Make America Great Again" signs would be provided, inside, by the campaign. Clothing with "expletive messages" was verboten.

That applied to a good deal of the merchandise outside. Several T-shirts on sale portrayed the president giving the middle finger with both hands, above vulgar text, the mildest of which was "suck it up, buttercup." One T-shirt, sold away from the main entrance, made a crude sexual joke about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on the front, with a different crude slogan on the back. (The shirt was lazily interpolated from an anti-Clinton design used for the 2016 campaign.)

The campaign enforced its no-expletives rule, turning attendees away unless they covered up the curse words or put on new shirts. It went further than that: People wearing QAnon iconography, associating themselves with a complicated conspiracy theory, said they were turned away, too. QAnon merchandise was hard to miss outside the rally, but nothing obvious it made it inside; an Instagram post by Eric Trump, sharing a QAnon logo, was deleted before the presidential scion took the stage.

At times, the proceedings resembled a national party convention, with the campaign promoting mainstream projects such as Women for Trump, and local candidates stopping by to meet voters. Miles Rahimi, a candidate in the 5th Congressional District 90 miles away, handed out brochures; campaigners for Rep. Roger Marshall, a Senate candidate in neighboring Kansas, brought merchandise to promote him. And Trump supporters were happy to oblige. 

"They told us: Your shirt is hilarious, but you can't have it here," said Therenda Reynolds, 41. She'd shown up with a homemade shirt reading "grab her by the . . ." followed by a slang term for female genitalia. Frustrated at the gate, she found tape to cover the offending word, returned and watched the president's speech.

- - -

Joe Biden isn't scaring the president's base

Saturday's rally was the first, by any candidate, since the president learned whom he'd be facing in November. While covid-19 overwhelmed traditional campaigning, Republicans have had three months to define Biden and drive up his negatives and to get supporters excited about keeping the 77-year-old Democrat out of the White House.

Saturday's events demonstrated how hard that's been. In dozens of interviews, not a single supporter of Trump, who is 74, expressed worry that Biden might win the election. Vendors sold almost no merchandise that mentioned Biden specifically; the exceptions were the aforementioned crude shirt and another that portrayed a shocked woman with the slogan "Hidin' from Biden: Free hugs and smells." That was sold by Cindy McGowing, 63, and Bret Kuchar, 59, who said anti-Biden merchandise was not flying off the table.

"He doesn't stand out as a strong candidate," McGowing said.

"I think that's because people know he doesn't have a chance," Kuchar said.

Polling has found Biden with a consistent lead, one that's grown since the start of this month. But the Trump campaign's difficulty in defining Biden emerged again and again in rally programming, which included hours of live panels from a stage in the overflow space. (As they walked into the arena, Trump supporters could hear and see the programming, too.) Biden became, alternately, "Basement Biden," "Sleepy Joe," "Jim Crow Joe," and in the words of Trump campaign senior adviser Katrina Pierson, "Jim Crow Confused Joe." 

Biden was accused of wanting to "fundamentally change America" while also "taking us back" to the pre-Trump era; Biden was excoriated for passing the 1994 crime bill while being accused of wanting to "defund the police." (Biden opposes defunding the police and has proposed a boost in community policing funds.)

There was a theme connecting the disparate attacks: Biden's age. Trump supporters and surrogates alike suggested that Biden was mentally checked out, with Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is dating Donald Trump Jr. and chairing a fundraising arm of the Trump campaign, suggesting his family was cruel to let him run when he wasn't up for it. If elected, Trump supporters said, Biden would be manipulated by the far-left forces he had defeated in the Democratic primary, negating any of his campaign trail promises. 

"He's a puppet," said Daniel Pearl, 46, whose rally shirt portrayed Bill and Hillary Clinton as mobsters. "Do you honestly think that if he won, he'd be running things?" 

Democrats have also mocked the president over some of his behavior; the president spent 12 minutes Saturday defending himself from the idea that he had shown weakness by walking slowly down a ramp at West Point's commencement. 

During the outdoor programming and the rally, Trump campaign surrogates repeatedly pointed to a turning point for Biden: the televised debates. When forced to face the president, they said, Biden would be revealed as unfocused and unready for the presidency. Left unsaid: that supporters of Bernie Sanders had said the same thing before Biden's only one-on-one debate with him.

"It's going to be an absolute bloodbath," Eric Trump said from the BOK Center stage. "Sleepy Joe doesn't stand a chance." 

At that moment, the overflow stage where the president had been expected to speak was being dismantled, a symbol of what can happen when expectations fall short of reality.

 

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