President Donald Trump (AFP File Photo)
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump boasted on Monday that almost a million people have requested tickets for his Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, amid growing concern even among his own associates that the event would send out wrong signals both on the health front (due to Covid-19), and in terms of political messaging because of the city’s association with a massacre of blacks.
Although Trump agreed to postpone the rally that was initially scheduled for a day known as Juneteenth (June 19), which commemorates the emancipation in 1865 of the last remaining enslaved Blacks in the Confederacy, he has doubled down on holding the event in the midst of a pandemic in a state where there has been an uptick in Covid-19 cases – and in a city where scores of African-Americans were lynched by white residents 99 years ago.
Oklahoma is among the 21 states where the average daily coronavirus infections has hit a record-high seven-day-average of new cases. But Trump is dismissing appr