In time of trauma, Trumps congratulates self

Trump has been preparing for his Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally on Saturday night, which shaped up to be the first indoor event of such a massive scale since the coronavirus pandemic took hold. Some public health officials implored him to move it outside or postpone it, fearing the event would spread sickness and death.

President Donald Trump prefaced the revival of his campaign rallies with days of self-congratulation, a familiar pattern that has not been disturbed by the traumas of this time. He devoted attention to the Obama administration, trashing it even while claiming some of its achievements as his own.

Perhaps most brazenly, he claimed credit for reducing suicides by veterans and offering them same-day emergency mental health counseling at Department of Veterans Affairs centers, achievements he inherited and did not build on. Trump has been preparing for his Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally on Saturday night, which shaped up to be the first indoor event of such a massive scale since the coronavirus pandemic took hold.

Some public health officials implored him to move it outside or postpone it, fearing the event would spread sickness and death. Large crowds were expected both inside and outside. A look at claims and the reality from the past week: VIRUS THREAT TRUMP: “Biden got failing grades and polls on his clueless handling of the Swine Flu H1N1. It was a total disaster, they had no idea what they were doing.” - tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: This is a distorted history of a pandemic in 2009 that killed far fewer people in the United States than the coronavirus is killing now. For starters, Joe Biden, as vice president, wasn't running the federal response. Federal public health officials were not at all flying blind when the H1N1 pandemic, also known as swine flu, came to the U.S. Then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's flu surveillance network sounded the alarm after two children in California became the first people diagnosed with the new flu strain in this country.

About two weeks later, the Obama administration declared a public health emergency and CDC began releasing anti-flu drugs from the national stockpile to help hospitals get ready. In contrast, Trump declared a state of emergency in early March, seven weeks after the first U.S. case of COVID-19 was announced. More than 119,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. The CDC puts the U.S. death toll from the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic at about 12,500.

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: “Oklahoma has really been in the forefront of our efforts to slow the spread. And in a very real sense, they've flattened the curve. ... The number of cases in Oklahoma - it's declined precipitously.” - remarks Monday. THE FACTS: The curve has actually been spiking higher since late May, not flattening.

Oklahoma did report just 41 new coronavirus cases on May 28, a relative low compared with early April. But infections have since increased. Last weekend, the state posted sharply higher numbers and set a daily record of new cases on Thursday, at 450. Oklahoma is among the nearly half the states that have seen coronavirus infections rise since May when governors began loosening social distancing orders and as more people were able to get tests.

In Tulsa, the infection rate is also rising steadily after remaining moderate for months. The four-day average number of new cases in the city has doubled from the previous peak in April. The city's health department director, Dr. Bruce Dart, urged that the rally be postponed, noting that large indoor gatherings are partially to blame for the recent spread. JUNETEENTH TRUMP: “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. ... It's actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.” - Wall Street Journal interview Wednesday.

THE FACTS: It's not true that no one had heard of it. No doubt it is better known now. Trump's campaign originally scheduled its Tulsa rally for Friday, placing it on the date symbolizing the end of slavery, June 19; Trump agreed to shift it to Saturday. Over two days in 1921, whites looted and burned Tulsa's black Greenwood district to the ground, killed up to 300 black Tulsans and forced survivors into internment camps.

Trump's comment that no one knew about Juneteenth before the furor created by his rally is contradicted by the years of festivities, the official commemorations by all but a few state governments and routine White House acknowledgments of the occasion. Trump's staff members have put out statements under his name each year of his presidency marking Juneteenth.

“Melania and I send our best wishes for a memorable celebration to all those commemorating Juneteenth,” says the 2019 statement outlining events of June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived at Galveston, Texas, with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were free. POLICE PRACTICES TRUMP, on abusive policing: “President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period. The reason they didn't try is because they had no idea how to do it.” - Tuesday at the White House.

THE FACTS: That is false. Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department opened 25 wide-ranging civil rights investigations into local law enforcement agencies across the country, including police departments in Chicago, Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri.

Those investigations were aimed at overhauling troubled departments with patterns of civil rights abuses and generally resulted in court-enforceable consent decrees requiring the agencies to commit to a series of fundamental changes with regard to the use of force, stops, searches and more. Besides that, the Obama White House established a task force to come up with best policing practices and to recommend ways to improve community trust while also reducing crime. That task force released its report in 2015.

That year, President Barack Obama barred the government from supplying certain types of military equipment to local police departments, a policy Trump reversed two years later. Public pressure may be more intense on Congress now to pass sweeping laws on policing, after nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But the limited steps Trump took Tuesday steered around Congress.