At President Donald Trump’s Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he told a laughably melodramatic story about his exit from the stage after the recent West Point military academy commencement ceremony that he participated in. Observers noted that when Trump walked down the ramp off that stage, he seemed to be shuffling as if he was struggling for balance, but Trump, who is seemingly forever pathologically desperate to make himself look good, tried to depict himself as accomplishing something grand by having walked down the stage at all. The anti-Trump GOP group known as The Lincoln Project shared a video (which had been made by Twitter user @FindAClearTruth) on Sunday that compared Trump’s pathetic spectacle to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s jog up the stage at the 2016 West Point commencement ceremony.
Lincoln saved the union. FDR vanquished Naziism. JFK sent us to the moon. Obama saved the economy. Trump walked down a ramp. https://t.co/uUhmR02R5w
— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) June 21, 2020
The ad begins with footage of Trump’s ridiculous explanation for his visible shuffling at the recent West Point ceremony. Trump compared the ramp he walked down to an ice-skating rink and complained about his own supposedly slippery shoes. When Biden spoke at a commencement ceremony for the same school in 2016, he literally jogged up the ramp to the stage.
This is art. pic.twitter.com/ZPJxHu20TV
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 21, 2020
Trump’s inane attempt to try and make his West Point spectacle into something other than a troubling instance of the president’s behavior was not the only ridiculous point of his weekend rally in Oklahoma. He also, for instance, used the racist term “Kung Flu” to refer to the Coronavirus and claimed that he’d asked White House officials to scale back testing in order to keep Coronavirus case numbers down. A White House official later claimed that Trump’s claim about suppressing testing was a joke.
NEW: A White House official says Trump was JK when he was talking about slowing down testing to suppress # of cases:
“He was clearly speaking in jest to call out the media’s absurd coverage. We are leading the world in testing, and we are proud to have conducted 25M plus tests.”— Weijia Jiang (@weijia) June 21, 2020
There was another problem at the rally — a lot fewer people showed up than the campaign was expecting. They planned for so many attendees that they set up an outdoor stage where Trump would speak to the “overflow” crowd. That stage was taken down and those plans were cancelled because the arena itself wasn’t even half full.
Trump's rally only had 6200 people, the Tulsa fire department confirms.
The arena held 19,000.
— Contented Independent (@ContentedIndie) June 21, 2020
