Trump's Tulsa Dud

President Donald J. Trump attempted to inject enthusiasm and energy into his faltering and flailing campaign by holding a rally in the reddest of red states, a place he won by double-digits in 2016, Tulsa, Oklahoma.  But from the moment Air Force One flew over the site and Trump got a look at the very small crowd that had gathered, the writing was on the wall; this would not be a good night for Trump.  And make no mistake, it was not a good night for Trump.  Even he knows it and all you need to see is the picture to the left of this paragraph to know exactly how Trump was feeling post-rally.  Aids say he was "furious and fuming" about apparently having been "played" by some kids from the social media platform TikTok and Kpop fans.  Check out this article for more on that.

From what I've gathered, the TikTok users got together with other younger social media users and they flooded the Trump campaign web site with ticket requests for the Tulsa rally, driving up the perceived demand substantially enough that the resulting anemic 6200 participants who actually showed up paled in comparison to the extremely high attendance projections that the campaign had been touting all week, including Trump in typical hyperbolic fashion making broad sweeping statements about how "no one has ever seen this much enthusiasm before" and that "we're already breaking records with ticket requests" and predicting that there would be "40,000 attendees in the overflow area" along with the 19,000+ who would be inside the arena itself.

However, it was clear from the beginning that interest in the event was moderate at best.  Of course none of this prevented the Trump campaign from blaming the low turn out on "radical left-wing thugs" conducting "violent protests" and allegedly "blocking access to entry points." 

Not to worry, though!  Since Trump knows all of this is bad press for him he's immediately gone back on the offensive by claiming -without citing a shred of evidence- that Barack Obama committed "Treason" by "Spying on [his] campaign."  (debunked exhaustively here)

And now we see Trump -who clearly knows he's very unlikely to win a second term- is now softening the ground for a "election fraud" excuse for losing by claiming, again with zero evidence of any kind, that the 2020 election will be "rigged" with millions of fraudulent ballots being mailed in from around the world.  No, this isn't some kind of comedy sketch.  The president of the united states, arguably the leader of the free world, the most powerful man on earth posted this to twitter yesterday at 7:16AM:

RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2020

I will put this as succinctly as possible, leaving very little room for interpretation as to what I actually mean when I tell you that this is absolutely fucking crazy. This man is not stable, obviously not fit for the office and should be removed forthwith. Unfortunately, we all know that Trump has taken 100% control and ownership over the GOP. There is no longer a GOP. There is the Trump party and then there is the rest of us.

Our country faced a moment like this 157 years ago when in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order that came to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation.  That was a huge moment in American history.  Americans all across the country were faced with a choice: Go along to get along or resist and fight for the right to continue to own people as property, buy and sell them like cattle, and house and feed them like livestock and make their fortunes on the backs of millions of oppressed and enslaved people whose only crime was being born in Africa.  Americans were faced with a choice then and Americans are faced with a choice now.  We all know how the choices we made back in 1863 changed the course of history and put The Union on the correct side of history and the Confederacy on the wrong side of history.  The Confederacy existed for 5 years.  They resisted the idea of all men being created equal and even after being slaughtered in the Civil War that followed the Emancipation Proclamation, those same people made it nearly impossible for African Americans to live in the south without fear of being lynched and killed at any given moment, with the killers most likely getting a pat on the back and some "way to go!" cheers from most of the people around them.

But I ask you this:  Have we really changed much since the days of the Jim Crowe south?  Institutional racism is everywhere.  Racism is so heavily ingrained into every part of our society that it's almost impossible for many white people to acknowledge that it exists.  We constantly hear people (99.999% of the time, white people) saying that there is no systemic racism problem in policing in America.  But all of the evidence we have now suggests otherwise.  Why is that?

Two Words:  CELL PHONES

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