Trump's Grotesque Tulsa Trip

[Zorro]

A racist president trolls his enemies with a rally on Juneteenth.

Most people — or, at any rate, most readers of The New York Times — remember Donald Trump’s response to the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va., as a particularly low point in a presidency full of them. After a rambling, aggrieved news conference in which he defended some of those marching with neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” Trump’s already dismal approval rating hovered below 38 percent. Staffers voiced shame and disgust to journalists (anonymously, of course). Senator Susan Collins was “concerned.”

What’s been forgotten in the almost three years that followed is what came next. For his first post-Charlottesville rally, Trump chose not a blood-red exurb, but Phoenix, a blue city with a large Hispanic population whose Democratic mayor implored the president to stay away.

Onstage, Trump hinted at his plans to pardon Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff who’d been convicted of contempt of court after defying a judge’s order to cease detaining people simply on suspicion that they were undocumented. Outside, protesters massed, and violence erupted as riot police confronted them. “Some screamed. Some poured milk on their face,” reported The Arizona Republic. “Skin, slicked in sweat, burned from the chemicals in the pepper balls and pepper spray.”

As The Washington Post reported at the time, Trump’s inflammatory event was part of a pattern: “When he finds himself under attack or slipping in popularity, he often holds a rally in a place like this: a diverse blue city that’s home to liberal protesters but surrounded by red suburbs and rural towns filled with Trump supporters who will turn out in droves.” His first rally after Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry was in the Minneapolis district held by Representative Ilhan Omar, whom Trump has repeatedly demonized.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/opinion/trump-rally-tulsa.html