TOPLINE
Amid a new wave of coronavirus cases in many states and protests against police brutality, President Trump announced Wednesday that he will resume his campaign rallies on June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, located in a county that’s seeing coronavirus infections spiking dramatically.
CHARLOTTE, NC – MARCH 2: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally on March 2, … [+]
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KEY FACTS
It’ll be Trump’s first rally since March 2, with the resumption of his free-wheeling live events coming amid the president’s flailing approval ratings and poor head-to-head performance in polls against presumptive Democratic candidate Vice President Joe Biden.
During the pandemic, Trump compensated for his inability to hold in-person events with elongated, televised White House briefings, and later used official visits to manufacturing facilities in swing states as pseudo campaign stops.
Tulsa County on Tuesday reported its largest one-day increase in confirmed cases, beating its previous record at the end of April and bringing the total in the county to 1,261 cases.
The rally will also take place on Juneteenth, a day commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S., and around two weeks removed from the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, when a white mob destroyed the prospering “Black Wall Street” neighborhood of Greenwood and killed as many as 300 black people.
Trump rallies are also planned in Florida, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina; the campaign has yet to detail safety procedures.
In total, there are 1,994,834 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States with new cases still rising in 19 states, as well as 112,647 reported deaths.
Key background
Trump’s campaign has pointed to the protests occurring during the pandemic as justification to jumpstart the rallies again. Demonstrators are pushing for accountability and policy changes in policing following the death of Floyd while he was being forcibly restrained by Minneapolis police officers including Derek Chauvin, who knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Some local municipalities have taken action, from banning chokeholds to cutting funding to announcing plans to disband and rebuild departments. The Trump administration has yet to propose any policy it would support but has said changes to qualified immunity protections outlined in a House bill are a “nonstarter.”
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