June 11 (UPI) — President Donald Trump announced Wednesday his re-election campaign will begin to hold the first post-pandemic in-person rallies beginning in Tulsa, Okla. next week.
Trump announced during an appearance that the campaign is also planning to launch upcoming rallies in Arizona, Florida and North Carolina and Texas.
The first rally is planned in Tulsa on Friday, June 19. Trump’s last in-person rally was held in Charlotte, N.C. on March 2, before states locked down to combat the infection spread of COVID-19.
“We’re going to start our rallies back up now. We’ve had a tremendous run at rallies,” Trump said at a roundtable with African American supporters. “They’ve done a great job with COVID, as you know, in the state of Oklahoma.”
The first rally will take place on the “Juneteenth” holiday, a memorial date that began in Galveston, Texas, celebrated by African Americans as marking the official end of slavery after the U.S. Civil War.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said the location of the Oklahoma rally will be “suitably safe.”
The campaign moved forward the re-launch of campaign rallies after social-distancing guidelines were disregarded by large groups of people gathered across the country to protest the police-involved killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“The CDC guidelines are still in place whether you’re at a rally or at the grocery store,” Murtaugh said on Wednesday.
“If they re-discover their desire for people to be socially distancing only if it’s a Trump rally, I think that we’ll see another display of hypocrisy from the national media,” Murtaugh added.
The Republican National Committee also this week voted to move the party’s August convention out of Charlotte, N.C. because Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, and other state health officials could not guarantee that large crowds could safely gather without risk of infection. The committee is expected to announce that it will move major events to Jacksonville, Fla.
