Donald Trump is holding his first campaign rally in months in one of the most racially loaded ways possible, and it is going to be very interesting—and potentially nauseating—to see what he does with that. Trump’s rally will be in Tulsa, site of a 1921 race massacre in which white people killed hundreds of Black people. And it will be on June 19—Juneteenth, the day that commemorates the last enslaved people learning about their freedom in 1865.
Trump broke the news of his rally plans during a Wednesday roundtable discussion with a group of Black supporters, furthering the sense that this is overtly and intentionally about race. The plot thickened further as April Ryan tweeted “High level Republican sources now tell me that @PastorDScott is the architect of the #WhiteHouse plan to ‘deliver a race speech at a unique venue important to Black people with an amazing civil rights backdrop.’”
That suggests that the plan is to bill this as not so much Ronald Reagan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, as Trump’s effort to acknowledge the history of racism and reach out to Black voters. Which seems … unlikely to go well, especially with Trump in front of a rally crowd, the exact environment in which he often goes on his most vicious rants. The plan was also announced the same day Trump ruled out renaming military bases named after Confederate leaders, so it’s not like he was in the mood for a big turnaround on racism.
Ryan added she had been told the speech would be written by Stephen Miller. Because you always want your “race speech at a unique venue important to Black people with an amazing civil rights backdrop” to be written by a white supremacist.
Basically, what Maya Harris said:
The other backdrop for this speech, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic that has prevented Trump from holding rallies since March 2. The Trump campaign is not yet saying what safety precautions it will put in place.