Trump on Tulsa Time

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

At about 10:30 on the morning of June 21st, 2020, Tulsa County Commissioner Karen Keith, a friend for years and its lone Democrat, called. 

“Hey, want to go to the rally?”

She was talking about the Trump rally. He was coming to town.

COVID was raging; some of the “very fine people” of Charlottesville, all unmasked, all festooned in red and white and bombast, were in town and already screaming about Confederate statues, Nancy Pelosi, and the New World Order; and Tulsa was on edge. Some stores had closed for the weekend; some were boarded up. A storm was coming.

“Of course I want to go.”

I live a few miles from the BOK Center, site of the first presidential campaign rally after Trump decided his ego needed stroking, a pandemic notwithstanding, and as Karen and I made it into downtown, along 6th Street, the arena in the foreground looking like an enormous and lopsided roll of duct tape, we noticed something: little traffic and plenty of parking. There’s always plenty of parking in Oklahoma, it’s part of its charm, but there wasn’t supposed to be today. It was noon, approximately six hours before the rally, a rally that Brad Parscale, the Trump presidential campaign manager before Trump canned him, said had received a million ticket requests. 

There are 651,552 residents of Tulsa County, which includes 176,579 registered Republicans. Statewide, there are about 4 million people, with 1,008,775 registered Republicans. 

“He’s full of s**t,” I said of Parscale (or Trump, maybe both, probably both) as we got out of the car.

“I know. And I also know what the BOK looks like during a sellout — this isn’t it.” 

We put on masks, if just for the contrast, and walked by kiosks, fronted by what seemed like an inordinate number of women speaking in broken English hawking MAGA hats and shirts.

“You buy? You want? Trump, yay!”

They were there, one woman from Poland told us, because an agency out of South Florida booked them to be here. They did this all over the country. They were the carnies and this was a county fair … sans the charm.

We saw a man giving away plastic face shields.

“Really great you’re doing this,” Karen told him, introducing herself, as she did all morning, as a county commissioner.

“The Trump people wouldn’t let me give them away any closer,” he told us.

“Why not?” I asked, just as a short nothing of a man approached.

“Can I help you?” he asked Karen.

“No, I’m just thanking this gentleman for bringing masks.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

She told him.

“Who are you?” he asked, pointing to me.

I said nothing.

“I’m with the campaign,” he barked, “and are you suggesting the campaign is not giving out masks?”

“I’m just thanking this gentleman for his initiative,” she said.

“What are your names?” he asked, taking out a pad and clicking his pen.

“Piss off,” I said. 

We walked away.

Herman Cain, who would be at the rally, who had previously mocked COVID preparedness, and who was subsequently seen at the rally not wearing a mask that may or may not have been given out by the campaign, would be dead from COVID in about a month.

Why bring all of this up?

Because in “Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, aside from re-establishing how unhinged Trump was, the ex-president said about coming to Tulsa that day in June: “I shouldn’t have never done that f***ing, f***ing rally.”

The double-negative makes it art, n’est-ce pas?

The event drew 6,200 in an arena that held 19,000. Oklahoma Gov. Stitt (R) strong-armed Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum into having the event after Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican, told Stitt he wanted no part of it. Bynum did himself no favors by going to the airport, unmasked, to meet the president, and bringing his new police chief, Wendell Franklin, also unmasked, with him. Story was the optics would embarrass the presidential party, as nobody on Air Force One, including (and most especially) the president, was wearing one. The mayor had been on CBS Sunday Morning a few weeks previously saying how shocked he was that mask-wearing was becoming a political statement.

I wrote in a piece for MediaPost at the time that the rally had failed “… every metric — messaging, tone, excitement, pretty pictures — exposing both the arrogance and incompetence of a campaign that has little room for error. If you’re choreographing Trump 2020, and you can’t make it in Oklahoma, you can’t make it anywhere.”

Trump, if Woodward and Costa got the story right, wasn’t regretting doing the rally because it was in the midst of God knows which COVID wave this was, nor because he was trampling on the city’s Juneteenth celebration (though he moved the event after taking credit for giving it credibility), nor because he made GOP officials looks gullible and foolish and irresponsible, nor because his friend Cain died, but because Parscale has promised him a crowd of more than a million people and he was made to look foolish. And a man in his position, to quote Jack Woltz in The Godfather, “Can’t afford to be made to look ridiculous!”

Karen and I wound up not going inside the BOK that day — the combination of pathos and anger was palpable — so instead, after briefly attending a counter-rally by Mount Zion Baptist Church, we wound up at a hamburger restaurant in the Greenwood District, sight of so much tsuris through the decades, and in the shadow of Interstate 244, that bulbous stent that runs through the heart of the neighborhood. 

“What did we just see?” she asked.

“This is hopefully going to be a huge embarrassment for him,” I replied

It was. Thank all the gods, it was.

Karen and I checked in with each other in the ensuing weeks after the rally to a) see if either had contracted COVID (we hadn’t), and b) marvel at our luck at witnessing the first major f***ing, f***ing crack in the Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign.

Barry Friedman is a satirist in Tulsa, Okla., and a lot of people are saying he is doing some very good work there. He is author of at least four books, including “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me: A Comedian’s Memoir.” See barrysfriedman.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2021

Populist.com