Trump set for Tulsa rally amid coronavirus fears and as protests continue – live
Donald Trump has promised a “wild evening” for his supporters in Tulsa in an interview with Axios published on Friday night, saying: “We have to get back to living our lives.”
Oklahoma’s second-largest city is braced for Trump’s first campaign rally since the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States, claiming more than 118,000 lives so far, plunging the economy into recession, and leading to widespread criticism of the president’s botched response to a crisis that has seen his approval ratings tank in recent polls.
The indoor rally, at Tulsa’s 19,000-person capacity BOK Center, comes as the city and the state of Oklahoma experience a surge in Covid-19 cases and local public health officials urge the campaign to reschedule the event over fears that the close contact between attendees – who will not be forced to wear face masks – could lead to more deaths.
The embattled president has used Twitter to threaten “protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes” in the city that they would “not be treated” in the same way they have in other parts of the country.
A federal judge ruled Saturday that former national security adviser John Bolton can move forward in publishing his tell-all book despite a last-ditch attempt by the Trump administration to block the release citing national security concerns.
US district judge Royce C Lamberth on Saturday denied the administration’s request for a restraining order. The Room Where It Happened is due to be published on Tuesday.
As Lamberth noted, hundreds of thousands of copies have been shipped for sale. But the judge did say it appeared Bolton had failed to complete a national security review.
“While Bolton’s unilateral conduct raises grave national security concerns,” the US district court judge wrote, “the government has not established that an injunction is an appropriate remedy.”
You can read Lamberth’s opinion here and more from my colleague Martin Pengellyhere.
Greta Thunberghas said the Black Lives Matter protests show society has reached a tipping point where injustice can no longer be ignored.
Reflecting on the protests that have swept the globe in recent weeks, the Swedish climate activist told the BBC: “It feels like we have passed some kind of social tipping point where people are starting to realise that we cannot keep looking away from these things. We cannot keep sweeping these things under the carpet, these injustices.
“People are starting to find their voice, to sort of understand that they can actually have an impact.”
Tipping point’: Greta Thunberg hails Black Lives Matter protests – video
Donald Trump was outraised by Joe Biden in May, taking in $74 million for his reelection, but he maintains a sizable advantage in cash on hand over the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to campaign finance reports filed with the FEC.
The Associated Press reports:
The pro-Trump effort, which includes fundraising by the Republican National Committee, on Saturday reported its total days after Biden and Democrats said they had amassed nearly $81 million last month for his White House bid.
Trump reported having $265 million in the bank at the end of May. Biden and Democrats have yet to disclose their comparable numbers for that period, but the figures were expected to be available later Saturday once the campaign made its official filing with the Federal Election Commission. The total was $103 million in the bank at the end of April.
Trump’s campaign announced this week that it raised $14 million last Sunday, which was the president’s birthday.
Biden on Monday brought in $6 million at a single event featuring Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a onetime rival for the nomination. He plans a fundraiser Tuesday with former President Barack Obama.
Trump’s campaign has begun wide-scale general election ads, spending about $24 million on television and digital spots over the past month, but it has come as the president’s standing in both public and private surveys has taken a hit.
Death seems to follow Donald Trump wherever he goes. At least, the Trump Death Clock does. The real-time tracker, that estimates the number of Americans who have died needlessly as a result of White House incompetence and inaction, has arrived in Tulsa ahead of the US president.
The clock, which currently puts the number of preventable deaths in the US at 71,662, is now beaming out from three strategically-located billboards in the Oklahoman city where they will be hard to miss by Trump supporters and detractors alike. A truck is also circling the Bank of Oklahoma Center where Trump will be speaking, carrying the clock and blasting out the names of Covid-19 dead over a loudspeaker.
The Trump Death Clock has arrived in Tulsa ahead of tonight’s rally. Photograph: Ed Pilkington
Eugene Jarecki, an award-winning filmmaker who is the mastermind behind the clock, is billing its presence in Tulsa as a public service. “We want everyone who attends Trump’s rally to have an opportunity to make an informed choice based on real numbers,” he said.
It has been seven weeks since Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis took a coronavirus “victory lap”, pressing ahead with a swift reopening program while berating the media for a “doom and gloom” approach he said bore little relation to reality.
“We haven’t seen an explosion of new cases,” DeSantis insisted during a 29 April news conference, a day on which the state’s Covid-19 tally increased by 347.
“There is a light at the end of the tunnel,” DeSantis, a keen Trump ally, added.
This week, however, it became clear that the Republican governor’s garden of roses is wilting fast in the face of a resurgent virus.
A period that began with Florida’s daily record of new cases below 1,700 saw eight consecutive days above that figure, five of them topping 2,000 and both Thursday and Friday seeing the highest numbers of all: 3,207 and 3,822 cases, respectively, eclipsing the previous recorded high by more than 35%.
The staggering figures have caused experts at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania to conclude that Florida has “all the markings of the next large epicenter of coronavirus transmission”.
My colleague Richard Luscombe has more from Miami here.
Robert Mueller and his investigators thought it possible Donald Trump lied to them about conversations with Roger Stone, according to previously redacted sections of the special counsel’s report which were were released on Friday night.
The release, part of litigation over portions of Mueller’s findings which remain secret, was largely overshadowed by US attorney general William Barr’s announcement of the resignation of the attorney for the southern district of New York, Geoffrey Berman, who then denied he was stepping down.
Stone, a political dirty trickster and longtime Trump aide and ally, famously claimed advance knowledge of material obtained by WikiLeaks which proved damaging to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Earlier this year, Stone was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election. He is due to report to prison this month, to serve a 40-month sentence.
In a hugely controversial move, Barr overruled prosecutors who recommended Stone be sentenced to seven to nine years.
In written answers, Trump told Mueller he did not recall talking to Stone about WikiLeaks. Multiple witnesses said he did.
The sections of Mueller’s report released on Friday include the following paragraphs: “It is possible that, by the time the president submitted his written answers two years after the relevant events had occurred, he no longer had clear recollections of his discussions with Stone or his knowledge of Stone’s asserted communications with WikiLeaks.
“But the president’s conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the president’s denials and would link the president to Stone’s efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks.”
Trump has repeatedly hinted at a pardon for Stone.
Speaking of the AP, here’s a section of its report on the toppling of a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike, which until last night stood in Washington, the capital of the Union from which he seceded and which he fought against in a brutal civil war with the aim of maintaining African American slavery in the Confederate states. It’s always seems worth spelling all that out, to me.
Eyewitness accounts and videos posted on social media indicated that police were on the scene but did not intervene. President Donald Trump quickly tweeted about the toppling, calling out DC mayor Muriel Bowser and writing: “The DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our country.”
Jubilant protesters read out Trump’s tweet over a bullhorn and cheered. After the statue fell, most protesters returned peacefully to Lafayette Park near the White House.
The AP also reports overnight from Raleigh, North Carolina, where “protesters pulled down parts of a Confederate monument and hanged one of the toppled statues from a light post”.
An interesting report from the Associated Press about the Associated Press, which has “changed its writing style guide to capitalise the ‘b’ in the term Black when referring to people in a racial, ethnic or cultural context”.
The change conveys ‘an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa,” said John Daniszewski, AP’s vice-president of standards. ‘The lowercase black is a color, not a person.’
The news organization will also now capitalize Indigenous in reference to original inhabitants of a place.
Daniszewski said the revisions aligned with long-standing identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American. He said the decision followed more than two years of research and debate among AP journalists and outside groups and thinkers.
‘Our discussions on style and language consider many points, including the need to be inclusive and respectful in our storytelling and the evolution of language, he wrote. ‘We believe this change serves those ends.’
The AP said it expects to make a decision within a month on whether to capitalize the term white. Among the considerations are what that change might mean outside the US.
The Guardian Style Guide says this: “Blackshould be used only as an adjective when referring to race, ie not ‘blacks’ but ‘black people’ or whatever noun is appropriate. Lower case unless an individual or organisation specifically prefers to use Black.
… and welcome to our live coverage of US politics, protests, the coronavirus outbreak and more.
As Covid-19 cases rise in Oklahoma (and other reopening, mostly Republican-led states), leaders of the White House coronavirus taskforce reportedly advised him not to go. Tulsa public health authorities, a local newspaper and more have asked him not to come. The Trump campaign has insisted that all attendees sign a waiver accepting responsibility should they contract Covid-19 at the BOK Center. The campaign says it is providing masks, sanitiser and more. But the rally is on.
There is also widespread civil unrest still to think about, ongoing since the killing by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May, still rippling across the country. Trump moved the rally back a day to avoid a clash with the Juneteenth holiday in a city which, 99 years ago, saw the worst race massacre in US history.
Wary of trouble between pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators, Tulsa was going to institute a curfew. Then Trump, who on Twitter seemed to threaten protesters with a harsh response from law enforcement, intervened. There will be no curfew.
Our southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, is in Tulsa. Here’s his report, as a city wakes to an uncertain day:
Trump will leave the White House late this afternoon.
There is of course much more to watch before then. For starters, in Washington last night protesters pulled down (and set on fire) the only Confederate statue in the District of Columbia. Hands up if you’d heard of Albert Pike, a general (and Mason) who some say was an influential figure in the early Ku Klux Klan, before this? Now you have. Statues continue to be attacked elsewhere.
In a familiar late-night Friday move, meanwhile, the attorney general, William Barr, announced the resignation of Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney in the southern district of New York who has investigated Trump allies including Rudy Giuliani.
In the words of Steve Vladeck, a widely read commentator and professor of law at the University of Texas: “It’s worth not losing sight of the fact that the Attorney General of the United States out-and-out lied in a written statement – and in a context in which there could have been little question to him that Berman would publicly call him out for doing so. And he did it anyway.”
