June 27, 2020

Eight Trump Campaign Staffers Test Positive for Coronavirus After Tulsa Rally

The fuckwit-in-chief at his rally in Tulsa last week.Tyler Tomasello/ZUMA

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President Trump campaign staffers who attended a recent rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma are being required to get tested for the coronavirus after eight people connected with the re-election bid tested positive, according to a memo obtained by ABC News on Friday.

The memo said explicitly that staffers “are required to obtain a negative COVID-19 test this weekend,” ominously leaving out the fate of staffers who test positive. The staffers who have already tested positive are still working while self-quarantining, according to a report.

Trump defiantly chose to proceed with the campaign rally despite surges in confirmed coronavirus cases across the country. As my colleague Jacob Rosenberg reported, Trump’s campaign didn’t even bother reaching out to local health officials to discuss the health implications of his rally. Oklahoma reported nearly 400 new cases in 24 hours, local news noted on June 26.

In addition to concerns over Trump rallies potentially being hotspots for spreading the virus, the rally had initially been scheduled for Juneteenth, the day celebrating the emancipation of enslaved Black people after the Civil War, in a city in which white mobs massacred a thriving community known as Black Wall Street in 1921. After public outcry, the Trump campaign decided to bump it back by one day. 

Talk about failing to read the room.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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