'I Made Juneteenth Very Famous'

In our interview, one year ago this week, Trump tried to put a spin on the controversy. He told me that he had made Juneteenth a day to remember.

"Nobody had heard of it," Trump told me.

He was surprised to find out that his administration had put out statements in each of his first three years in office commemorating Juneteenth.

"Oh really?" he said. "We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?"

Each statement, put out in his name, included a description of the holiday.

But such details were irrelevant to him. Instead, he insisted, "I did something good."

"I made Juneteenth very famous," he said.

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Senior officials described his understanding of slavery, Jim Crow or the Black experience in general post-Civil War as vague to nonexistent.

excerpt

...As Trump stewed amid negative coverage of the worsening pandemic, the deepening recession and now the racial justice protests, it was clear to campaign aides that they needed to get their candidate back on the road again, and soon.

In early June, Trump gathered a dozen of his top White House staffers and campaign aides—plus Mike Lindell, the MyPillow company founder and a vocal Trump supporter—to discuss the campaign's television advertising strategy and a return to the campaign trail. Trump admired the success Lindell had selling pillows with infomercials, and Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, cornered Lindell before the meeting and urged him to attest to the brilliance of the advertising campaign.

Parscale's prep work paid off. Trump turned to Lindell as soon as campaign staffers finished their presentation on the advertising strategy.

"Mike, are they doing a good job?" Trump asked.

"Yes, they're doing great!" Lindell said. "I've talked to them before, and they're talking to my team."

The meeting then turned to a discussion about rallies, and Parscale presented 11 potential locations in six different states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Nearly all of the sites were outdoors.

But Florida was off the table. Parscale suggested a drive-in-style rally in Central Florida, but Trump said Governor Ron DeSantis didn't want a big crowd in his state during the pandemic. Parscale urged Trump to call DeSantis and tell him it was safe, but Trump refused.

No one liked the options in Arizona—the weather was too hot for an outdoor rally, and a spike in Covid cases precluded indoor venues—and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were all governed by Democrats. That left Tulsa, Oklahoma, which had landed on Parscale's list after he asked Pence earlier that week about which state, governed by a Trump-friendly Republican, had the fewest Covid restrictions in the nation. The Mabee Center—the 11,300-seat arena Parscale proposed that day—had been the location of a Trump rally during the 2016 campaign. Trump was sold. (Parscale moved the venue to the 19,000-seat Bank of America Center after ticket requests shot through the roof, a result of both a prank from TikTok teens and a campaign decision to blast the announcement out to supporters across the country.)

Parscale recommended holding the Tulsa rally on June 19. No one on Parscale's team flagged that day—or that combination of time and place—as potentially problematic. Had Parscale bothered to ask Katrina Pierson, the highest-ranking Black staffer on the campaign and a close friend of Parscale's, she would have told him that June 19 was Juneteenth, a significant holiday for Black Americans that commemorated the end of slavery. She also would have said to him that Tulsa, as most Black Americans are well aware, had been home to one of the bloodiest outbreaks of racial violence in the nation's history.

When staffers inside the Republican National Committee heard about the plans, they immediately pushed back.

"Don't do this," Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, told Parscale. "The media is not going to give us the benefit of the doubt, especially now."

There still was time to change the date or reconsider plans entirely. The campaign hadn't yet signed contracts with vendors or the arena or even publicly announced the event. But Parscale dug in. Parscale's only previous campaign had been Trump's 2016 bid. Still, what the marketing and advertising veteran lacked in political experience, he filled in with overconfidence in what he viewed as his unlimited ability to win hearts and change minds.

On June 10, Trump had a single item on his public schedule: a 12:30 p.m. intelligence briefing. But, as was often the case with the Trump White House, that changed suddenly without any significant notice.

At 3:30 p.m., the White House summoned whichever reporters hadn't wandered too far from their briefing room desks and quickly ushered them into the Cabinet Room, where Trump sat with Kushner and, as Trump described them, "friends of mine and members of the African American community." That included Ben Carson, Trump's housing secretary; Darrell Scott and Kareem Lanier, the founders of the Urban Revitalization Coalition; and Republican gadfly Raynard Jackson, who had sued the party over the trademark for "Black Republican Trailblazer Awards Luncheon," which he believed that he, not the GOP, owned.

Trump said the meeting had been called to address law enforcement, education and healthcare issues. But for the next half-hour, Trump didn't articulate any particular policy that would address any of those issues. The one thing Trump did talk about most extensively that afternoon: his return to rallies.

"We're going to start our rallies back up now," Trump informed the press. "The first one, we believe, will be probably—we're just starting to call up—will be in Oklahoma."

As reporters were ushered out of the room, one journalist asked Trump when he planned to be in Tulsa.

"It will be Friday," Trump said. "Friday night. Next week."

Juneteenth.

Democrats went on the warpath. Trump, they said, couldn't be more insensitive to the world erupting all around him. Trump's response was also impaired by his stunning disregard for history, particularly compared to most other modern presidents.

Senior officials described his understanding of slavery, Jim Crow or the Black experience in general post-Civil War as vague to nonexistent.

Now, the rally on Juneteenth threatened to exacerbate the racial fissures further.

The backlash shocked Trump. He started quizzing everyone around him.

"Do you know what it is?" Trump would ask.

Two days after announcing his rally, Trump turned to a Secret Service agent, who was Black, and asked him about Juneteenth.

"Yes," the agent told Trump. "I know what it is. And it's very offensive to me that you're having this rally on Juneteenth."

At 11:23 p.m. that night, Trump posted on Twitter that he wanted to change the date.

***

The following week, on the afternoon of June 17, my phone vibrated with a call from the White House. It was a few days before Trump's Tulsa rally, and the president wanted to see me.

In our interview, one year ago this week, Trump tried to put a spin on the controversy. He told me that he had made Juneteenth a day to remember.

"Nobody had heard of it," Trump told me.

He was surprised to find out that his administration had put out statements in each of his first three years in office commemorating Juneteenth.

"Oh really?" he said. "We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?"

Each statement, put out in his name, included a description of the holiday.

But such details were irrelevant to him. Instead, he insisted, "I did something good."

"I made Juneteenth very famous," he said.

Trump would arrive in Tulsa to a half-filled arena. Parscale had hightailed it out of the backstage area when he saw Trump and the White House entourage approaching—no one had told the president that the BOK Center wasn't anywhere close to capacity.

Before rallies, White House aides usually inflated crowd sizes for Trump once they were told a capacity crowd was inside the building. On the way to Tulsa, no one knew how to break the disappointing news to Trump. It wasn't until he was backstage and turned on the television that he realized the arena was two-thirds empty.

When Trump finally took the stage that night, he urged his latest audience to forget the past several months. From the rally stage in Tulsa, Trump sought a fresh start for his reelection bid.

"So we begin, Oklahoma," the president would tell them. "We begin. We begin our campaign."

But the truth was the campaign had begun long ago. What was actually beginning now, for Trump, was the end.

Adapted from 'Frankly We Did Win This Election': The Inside Story of How Donald Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender.