Trump Returns To Oklahoma For First Time Since Infamous COVID Rally To Start Midterm Tour

President Donald Trump staged his first rally in Oklahoma on Thursday since his infamous, nearly empty one at the height of the COVID pandemic, kicking off his midterm campaign schedule in a safe pro-Trump region hundreds of miles from the nearest competitive House race.

“So in just 33 days from now, the people of Oklahoma are going to defeat the radical left Democrats once again,” he told a few thousand of his followers in Durant.

Oklahoma supported Trump by a 34-percentage-point margin in 2024. The closest House district analysts rated a “toss-up” to Trump’s rally site was 350 miles away in Texas.

Asked by reporters as he left the White House earlier in the day why his first four rallies — Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio and Nebraska — are all in states he won by double digits in 2024, Trump at first said, “I won all of them by a lot. I’m going there just to make sure.”

He then added that he was going to Oklahoma to “thank” the voters for their loyal support. “I’m going to thank Oklahoma. They’ve been just an unbelievable state,” he said.

Trump repeated that line to his audience after bragging about having won all 77 of the state’s counties.

“I really came here to pay my respect to a place, really to a place that I love and I appreciate. So that’s why I’m here. Thank you very much,” he said.

The remainder of his speech was filled with his usual lies: that he has brought in $21 trillion in foreign investment; that new factories are being built all over the country because of his tariffs; that other countries emptied their prisons and sent all the inmates to the United States.

He also repeated the one lie, though, that most Americans appear not to be believing: “We’ve handled inflation. We’ve got prices way down.”

Trump has, in reality, increased inflation from the level he inherited from predecessor Joe Biden thanks to his trade war against the world and his actual war against Iran. According to recent polling, it is the biggest reason his approval rating is at historic lows.

Trump’s last rally in Oklahoma was also scheduled because of its voters’ strong support for him. After first telling Americans six years ago that the COVID virus was not that serious, then claiming it would be gone by Easter, Trump insisted on staging a rally in Tulsa to show the country that the pandemic was over.

His campaign staff was certain the 19,000-seat Bank of Oklahoma Center would be completely filled and then became giddy when demand for tickets continued to rise, predicting that several hundred thousand or even a million supporters might show up. To accommodate them, they created massive fairgrounds outside the arena, complete with giant screens to show the rally to those who couldn’t get in.

In the end, a mere 6,200 or so showed up on June 20, 2020, and the outdoor attractions were hastily torn down. Among those who did attend: former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, who soon after died of COVID.

Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Mobile, Alabama, on Friday evening; another in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday; and a third in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday.