Trump’s Tulsa Hangover, Plus the Bubba Wallace Backfire · The Daily Fuckup

Edition · June 23, 2020

Trump’s Tulsa Hangover, Plus the Bubba Wallace Backfire

Backfilled for June 23, 2020 in America/New_York, this edition centers the biggest Trump-world screwups that crystallized that day: the coronavirus fallout from the Tulsa rally and the president’s race-baiting response to the Bubba Wallace noose controversy.

June 23, 2020 delivered a tidy little double feature of Trump-world self-destruction. The Tulsa rally’s virus fallout kept getting worse as campaign staff positive tests piled up and public-health warnings looked increasingly justified. Then the Bubba Wallace case turned into a racial and political mess after federal authorities said the noose found in Wallace’s garage stall was not a hate crime, teeing up a later backlash machine that was already baked into the day’s coverage. Together, they showed a president and his ecosystem still mistaking recklessness for strength.

Closing take

The through-line here is simple: Trump’s instinct was to double down, not de-escalate. On June 23, that meant treating the pandemic like a bad PR problem and race as a culture-war prop. Both moves came with visible consequences, and neither aged remotely well.

Ranked by how bad the fuckup was

5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.

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Tulsa Rally Virus Fallout Keeps Getting Worse

Virus Fallout Confidence 4/5

★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5 Serious fuckup

The Trump campaign’s Tulsa rally kept boomeranging on June 23 as new positive coronavirus tests among campaign staff reinforced fears that the event was a public-health own goal. The campaign had already admitted that multiple advance staffers were infected before the rally, and the day’s reporting made the basic problem impossible to ignore: this was a political spectacle held in defiance of the pandemic’s reality, and the immediate aftermath was more case counts, more criticism, and more evidence that the White House had normalized risk as messaging.

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Wallace Noose Case Turns Into a Trump-World Race Trap

Race Backlash Confidence 4/5

★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5 Major mess

Federal authorities said on June 23 that the noose found in Bubba Wallace’s garage stall was not a hate crime, which instantly shifted the story from righteous solidarity to a new round of right-wing insinuation and culture-war garbage. Even before Trump’s later public attack on Wallace, the day’s result was already a political mess for the broader Trump ecosystem: a genuine racial scare had been replaced by smug cleanup from people more interested in score-settling than facts.

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