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Virus Fears, Low Turnout and Cheers at Trump's Tulsa Rally

Patsy Widakuswara

   WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump held a campaign rally in Tulsa,
   Oklahoma, Saturday evening, his first since the beginning of the
   coronavirus pandemic.

   The event was designed to be a show of political force to reenergize
   his base ahead of the November election but was marked by coronavirus
   fears and a lower-than-expected turnout.

   Declaring "the silent majority is stronger than ever before," Trump
   called his supporters "warriors" and hit on familiar campaign themes,
   including conservative judicial appointees, low taxes, the booming
   stock market, the wall on the southern border with Mexico, and ramping
   up the military budget. The 1-hour, 40-minute speech was full of
   attacks on his Democratic rival and presidential nominee-in-waiting Joe
   Biden, the "radical left" and "fake news."

   Trump defended his administration's handling of the pandemic, blaming
   the high numbers -- over 2.2million coronavirus cases and 119,000
   deaths nationwide -- on extensive coronavirus testing.

   "When you do testing to that extent, you're gonna find more people,
   you're gonna find more cases. So, I said to my people, slow the testing
   down, please," Trump said, adding that his administration "saved
   millions of lives."

   While Trump has often referred to the coronavirus as the "Chinese
   virus." For the first time he referred to it publicly as the "kung-flu"
   and blamed Beijing for the pandemic.

   Ridiculing calls by some on the left to defund the police, Trump
   brought back the racially charged term "hombre."

   "It's 1 o'clock in the morning," Trump said. "A very tough hombre is
   breaking into the window of a woman whose husband is away as a
   traveling salesman or whatever he may do. You call 911, and they say,
   'I'm sorry, this number is no longer working.'"

   Trump first used the term during the 2016 election campaign when he
   labeled people who came to the U.S. illegally "bad hombres" and called
   for their deportation.

   In a speech that mostly focused on domestic issues, Trump boasted about
   the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Iran's Islamic
   Revolutionary Guard Corps major general Qassem Soleimani. He mentioned
   China at least 11 times, mostly in the context of laying blame for the
   pandemic and the trade war, and calling presumptive Democratic
   presidential nominee Joe Biden "a puppet for China."

   The president disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement and media
   coverage of the protests that have rocked the country for weeks since
   the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man who died while in the
   custody of Minnesota police officers.

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