But nobody had ever heard of it

Trump made Juneteenth very famous.

The Times explains the car crash:

Reviewing a list of potential locations over the past few weeks, [Brad] Parscale quickly settled on Tulsa, Okla., people familiar with the planning said in interviews, mostly because it seemed easy. A deep red state President Trump carried by 36 percentage points four years ago, Oklahoma wasn’t in play for the November election. But it was the furthest along of any state in the country in terms of reopening, and it had seen fewer than 400 Covid-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

A city with a supportive Republican mayor, where the coronavirus was no longer having a deep impact on daily life, seemed like the most effortless way to pack an arena and deliver Mr. Trump the adulatory validation he craved.

And to get those Covid-19 numbers way up!

But to the surprise of no one except possibly Brad Parscale, it has all gone wrong.

Mr. Trump and his aides failed to grasp the significance of holding a rally on Juneteenth, a holiday celebrated annually on June 19 that honors the end of slavery in the United States. Nor did they appear to realize that Tulsa was the site of one of the country’s bloodiest outbreaks of racist violence.

Which means they didn’t bother to do any basic research, or talk to anyone outside their bubble of corrupt hacks.

Ignoring Tulsa’s troubled history, as well as the Juneteenth holiday, has put the community on edge as the rally approaches, and refocused attention on how few African-American aides work on Mr. Trump’s campaign or in the White House.

Well, that, but more basically, Trump’s total lack of interest in the “troubled history” of black people in the US, coupled with his strong and passionate interest in overt racism. One, he doesn’t give the tiniest shit about slavery and its hideous aftermath, and two, he’s an unabashed racist who spews racist shit on a regular basis.

Other than that…

So anyway they changed the date. You’d think Trump would dig in because that’s what he does, but no, see, the thing is, it wasn’t his idea in the first place so it’s cool.

For a president whose guiding political philosophy has been to double down in the face of criticism, it was seen as a stunning reversal. But Mr. Trump was amenable to changing the date, multiple officials said, in part because it did not involve caving on something he had said or a theory he had promoted, but rather involved publicly overturning a decision made by his campaign aides.

That’s very funny, in a quiet way. “Oh he was fine with it,” multiple officials said, “because it makes someone else look bad, and you know he loves that.”

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