Supporters of President Donald Trump are being asked to immunize his campaign from COVID-19 liability claims if they want to attend his next campaign rally.
‘By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.; BOK Center … or volunteers liable for any illness or injury.’
The BOK Center is the large indoor arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that will be the site of the June 19 20 Trump reelection campaign rally, the first for the president since the coronavirus pandemic has dominated the public’s attention.
(Roll Call, June 11, 2020)
We always knew the (white) Evangelicals who compose Trump’s base were prepared to sacrifice their souls at the altar of his political ambitions. Now we know they are even prepared to sacrifice their lives.
Meanwhile, Trump is showing once again that his insecurity, psychopathy, and narcissism know no bounds. Because you’d think the notorious backlash he got for turning America’s Lafayette Square into a version of China’s Tiananmen Square just for a photo-op would have chastened him.
But he’s clearly dying to hear the applause and hosannas of his … worshipers. Only that explains him calling them to this campaign rally the way Billy Graham used to call sinners to his revivals. Except that Trump knows full well that, in doing so, he could kill them. But he does not care, so long as he hears them singing his praises before they die; oh, and that they’ve signed his waiver absolving him of any liability.
This constrains me to share the refrain I’ve been bemoaning ever since the morning after in “WTF! President-elect Donald J. Trump?! America. What. Have. You. Done?” November 9, 2016; namely that the black-swan presidency of this schmuck says far more about the American people than it says about him.
However, as I never fail to point out to my foreign friends, the beauty of the American people is their limitless ability to course correct. As it happens, no less a person than former President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed this very point in his famous “We Shall Overcome” speech on March 15, 1965.
Johnson was addressing a Joint Session of Congress after police triggered a week of riots in cities across the country when they brutally attacked peaceful civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama:
At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
(The History Place)
And so it was (again) in Minneapolis, Minnesota two weeks ago …
Of course, these are the same American people who elected the black Barack Obama in 2008. Therefore, it hardly strains credulity to think that, after averting their eyes to an avowed racist and now seeing the consequences, they will not rush to the polls in November to kick him out. Turning point!
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