The rally made headlines for its empty seats, but things were even worse behind the scenes, writes Jonathan Karl. The president feuded with advisers, shouted down objections, and ended up with a car full of sick staffers—and one who was “worried he was going to die.”
On April 24, 2020, Donald Trump received a grim message on a conference call with his campaign advisers. Campaign manager Brad Parscale walked the president through polls conducted by his pollster. The results were dreadful.
“In February, you were on track to win more than four hundred electoral votes,” Parscale told him, saying he had been poised to win even bigger than he won in 2016. “But now you are losing ground everywhere.”
Parscale later told me he didn’t sugarcoat the bad news, telling the president that the pandemic, and public disapproval of his response, had been devastating to his standing and that if he didn’t turn things around, he would lose.
“If I lose, I’m going to sue you,” Trump said.
“I love you, too,” Parscale answered. He insists the president was joking about the lawsuit, but he was obviously angry about his tanking poll numbers.
The next week, Trump did in fact take a break from his daily press conferences. They would come back, but only sporadically. The daily Trump Show in the White House briefing room was over. Trump needed another outlet. The key to turning around his polls, he told his advisors, was to get out on the road again. He had not held a campaign rally since March 2, and he was convinced that was his real problem. He was desperate to get out of the White House and in front of his adoring supporters.
“He was just beside himself,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a close advisor to Trump whom he called frequently throughout the campaign for advice, told me. “All he could think about was the campaign. He didn’t talk much about anything else. COVID would come into it, but really his focus was on the campaign.”
During another contentious campaign conference call in May, Trump demanded that Parscale put together a plan to get him back on the road as soon as possible. He made this demand as coronavirus infections and deaths continued to skyrocket and all large events—from concerts and baseball games to weddings and funerals—were on hold due to a nationwide shutdown.
Parscale presented Trump with a series of options for a first rally in June. He first proposed a drive-in rally in Tampa, Florida. Parscale told him a drive-in rally would be a great spectacle, with a line of cars he wanted a crowd. Parscale next put together a presentation of eleven other possible locations, most of them in outdoor venues, including Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. Parscale even pitched Trump on a twelfth option: holding a boat rally outside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. According to Parscale, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told the campaign to pick a location outside of Florida because the state wasn’t ready to hold a big event due to the threat of the pandemic.
Trump wanted to relaunch his campaign with a bang, a real Trump rally—indoors and packed with people. Exactly the kind of thing that was happening nowhere in America—or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. He chose Tulsa, Oklahoma, which had a friendly Republican governor and mayor—a place where, given COVID, holding a rally might be dangerous, but, unlike in most other states, it wouldn’t be against the law.
The campaign announced the rally for June 19 and then moved it back a day after facing intense criticism for holding it on Juneteenth, the long-celebrated date marking the freedom of the last slaves in America. The controversy and the date change didn’t slow the campaign’s hype machine, which was portraying the rally as the Super Bowl of campaign events. “Trump #MAGA Rally in Tulsa is hottest ticket ever!” Parscale tweeted a week before the scheduled date. Days later, he tweeted again: “Just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing!” The following day, Parscale again bragged about the reservation numbers, claiming they’d received more than 1 million ticket requests.
Trump was thrilled. Not only would he be back on the campaign trail, his massive rally would prove America was back and the pandemic had been defeated. Trump’s campaign aides believed the rally would show that the news media was overhyping the threat of the pandemic. But concerns were being expressed by public health officials in Oklahoma. One week before the scheduled date, the executive director of the Tulsa Health Department pleaded with Trump to delay the rally.
“I think it’s an honor for Tulsa to have a sitting president want to come and visit our community, but not during a pandemic,” Dr. Bruce Dart told the local newspaper, the Tulsa World. “I’m concerned about our ability to protect anyone who attends a large, indoor event, and I’m also concerned about our ability to ensure the president stays safe as well.”
During an event at the White House on June 15, Trump brushed off a question about those concerns, boasting about the size of the crowd he expected to show up.
“As you probably have heard, and we’re getting exact numbers out, but we’re either close to or over one million people wanting to go,” Trump said. “Nobody has ever heard of numbers like this. I think we’re going to have a great time.”
Privately, Trump was even more elated about his return to the campaign trail.
“We’re back, baby,” Trump told Chris Christie over the phone a few days before the rally, repeating the claim that more than a million people had signed up for tickets. “This is gonna be great. We are getting back on the road and the campaign back on track.”
In reality, the Tulsa rally would end up being a political disaster and, for Trump, the worst day of his entire campaign.
The night before the rally, Trump campaign staffers who had traveled to Oklahoma partied together at the restaurant bar of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tulsa. The tight-knit team had not been all together for a rally in months. They were ready to celebrate, drinking together until well past midnight. After the bar closed, some in the group retreated to a staff room in the hotel and raided the minibar—drinking and celebrating well into the morning hours. Nobody bothered to keep their distance or wear masks. As it turned out, the virus wasn’t just spreading across the country—it was also spreading among the Trump campaign staff.
The following morning, staffers woke up hungover from the festivities and skulked downstairs for breakfast in the hotel restaurant. As one of the senior campaign officials described it, they were eating “crappy bagels” when word came that members of the team had tested positive for COVID- 19.
“Put your mask on,” one campaign aide told another, hunched over breakfast food. “We have staff popping positive.”
“How many?” they replied.
“We’re already at eight.”
After that, members of the campaign staff in Tulsa frantically tried to retrace their steps from the party the night before, worried they would be next to test positive. “We were all trying to figure out who’s testing positive, because we were all thinking, ‘Oh, shit. Was I near that person last night?’” a senior Trump campaign official told ABC News reporter Will Steakin, who was in Tulsa to cover the rally but fortunately had stayed clear of the hotel bar and the infected Trumpers.
Back at the White House and the Trump campaign headquarters, there was less concern about the health of the campaign staffers who had been infected than about the political fallout of the campaign rally turning into a pandemic super-spreader event. According to two senior campaign officials, after the eighth person tested positive, two of them with the Secret Service, word came down from the campaign leadership: STOP TESTING. This directive came after NBC News broke the story that six members of the campaign staff who had traveled to Tulsa to set up the rally had tested positive, a report that actually understated the number of infected staffers. The headlines were embarrassing. Trump was furious that news about infected campaign staffers was getting in the way of news about his triumphant return to the campaign trail.
But that wasn’t the only bad news spreading among the team that day. Steakin was on the ground early outside the Tulsa rally, arriving around ten a.m. for a rally not scheduled until that evening. As a veteran of roughly fifty Trump rallies, Steakin knew you had to arrive hours early to have any chance of finding parking. He also knew that no matter how early he arrived, there would be scores of Trump supporters already in line, many of whom would have camped out overnight. But something seemed off when he made his way to the Tulsa rally—he easily found a parking spot right by the arena. And as he talked to Trump supporters outside, many of them weren’t sure they would go in for the rally. They were concerned about coronavirus at what would be the first large indoor event in America in months.
As Trump flew to Tulsa aboard Air Force One, he watched the news coverage on television. It was all bad—television reporters talking about the positive COVID tests, the massive security, and, worst of all, the lack of a crowd. As Air Force One prepared to land in Tulsa, Trump called Parscale to check in on the thing he cared about the most: the size of the crowd.
“Is it going to be full?” Trump asked.
“No, sir. It looks like Beirut in the eighties,” Parscale responded.
Parscale, who had been watching in disbelief as the disappointing crowd trickled inside the arena, was depressed. He offered a heartfelt apology to the president. “I’m sorry. I threw everything I could at it,” he said. In response, Trump hung up on him. The president was so enraged, some senior aides feared he would refuse to get off Air Force One and instead fly back to Washington. Parscale, knowing Trump was fuming, told senior staff: “None of you should go anywhere near the president today, including me.”
For Trump, Tulsa was a disaster because of the empty seats, but it was much more than that. The rally was a metaphor for how Trump had mishandled the pandemic. He dismissed the warnings of public health professionals, downplayed the danger, believed he could talk his way out of it all, and showed a total disregard for the consequences of his actions.
Incredibly, the Trump campaign staffers who tested positive were told to grab rental cars and to drive, while infected with COVID-19, back to Washington. Under public health guidelines, anybody infected with coronavirus was supposed to self-isolate for at least ten days to prevent further spread of the disease. Instead, these infected Trump campaign staffers were instructed to drive more than 1,200 miles back home. At least one of the cars was pretty crowded with infected staff members. “There was a car of three staffers who had tested positive that drove all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Washington, D.C.,” a senior advisor said. “We called it a COVID-mobile.”
The event caused problems for the Secret Service, as dozens of agents needed to quarantine after two agents who worked at the Tulsa rally tested positive. The consequences were more dire for one prominent Trump supporter. Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate who the president’s team flew out to attend the rally, tested positive for COVID-19 days after the event. Cain, who was 74, was photographed inside the arena without a mask, sitting jam-packed with a group of other well-known Trump supporters who were also not wearing masks. Days after testing positive, Cain was hospitalized. A month later, on July 30, Cain died from complications of the coronavirus. The news devastated Trump campaign staff. Many felt like they were to blame for his death. “We killed Herman Cain,” one senior staffer told Steakin not long after Cain’s death.
There’s something else neither Trump nor his campaign ever disclosed. One of the campaign staffers who tested positive became severely ill. This employee of the Trump campaign, whose name I’ve been asked not to disclose, was unable to drive home like the others. Instead, this staffer was hospitalized in Tulsa for a week. This staffer had been worried about the dangers of working on the rally because of preexisting conditions that made the prospect of being infected especially dangerous, but the president had demanded an indoor rally despite the warnings of public health officials, and the staffer faithfully responded by helping to organize it. Now that the rally was over, the president was back in Washington complaining bitterly that more people had not shown up, while this campaign worker was stuck in Tulsa, lying in a hospital bed thinking his life was about to end.
“It was really scary,” a senior campaign official revealed for the first time in an interview for this book. “He was actually worried he was going to die.”
From BETRAYAL: The Final Act of the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl, to be published by Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan Karl.
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If you support Trump you deserve cancer.