US president says 'silent majority is stronger than ever before' – as it happened

Here’s what’s happened today:

• The president’s rally in Tulsa came in for criticism after the president said he had asked for Covid-19 testing to be slowed down. The White House has claimed Trump was joking. But his remarks are in line with a series of previous remarks he’s made expressing doubts about testing and its uncanny ability to increase the number of recorded cases.
• The president’s much hyped return turned to humiliation when he failed to fill the arena in the Republican stronghold of Oklahoma.
• Our columnist Richard Wolffe says Trump’s Tulsa rally was just another sad farce. “Campaign officials should be ready for firings and fury after a pathetic event made worse by wretched attempted excuses”.
• Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney behind inquiries into Trump allies, resigned after William Barr announced his firing

Oliver Laughland is on the ground for us in Tulsa and says scenes on the streets are peaceful at the moment:

21 Jun 202023.30 EDT

David Smith

Donald Trump declared “the silent majority is stronger than ever before” at his comeback rally on Saturday, but thousands of empty seats appeared to tell a different story.

The US president’s much hyped return to the campaign trail turned to humiliation when he failed to fill a 19,000-capacity arena in the Republican stronghold of Oklahoma, raising fresh doubts about his chances of winning re-election.

“The Emperor has no crowd,” tweeted Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama.

The overwhelmingly white gathering at Trump’s first rally since March was dwarfed by the huge multiracial crowds that have marched for Black Lives Matter across the country in recent weeks, reinforcing criticism that the president is badly out of step with the national mood.

The flop in Tulsa was an unexpected anticlimax for an event that seemed to offer a combustible mix of Trump, protests over racial injustice and a coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and put more than 40m out of work.

You can read the full report below:

21 Jun 202023.16 EDT

Lois Beckett

More on the protests in Tulsa.

Mason Haynes, 21, an Oklahoma film student who has been photographing and filming the protest, told the Guardian over the phone that law enforcement had used pepper-ball chemical irritant and shot bean bags at protesters near the corner of Fifth St and Boulder Avenue about half an hour ago.

The protesters in that area included both Black Lives Matter and pro-Trump protesters, Haynes said.

Various law enforcement vehicles had been trying to get through the intersection, he said, and a bus full of the national guard had “got stuck in front of the protesters, and the cops kind of had to take control,” he said, “by shooting peaceful protesters with chemical irritant.”

More recently, reporters with the Tulsa World and others tweeted that some protesters have marched to Tulsa’s historic “Black Wall Street” in Greenwood, where music is playing and the demonstration has become upbeat.

Protesters are still out on the streets of Tulsa following the Donald Trump rally. Police fired pepper balls into the crowd earlier but the situation appears to have calmed down for now.

21 Jun 202022.55 EDT

Outrage as Trump says he asked for coronavirus testing to be slowed down

Max Benwell

In one of the more remarkable moments of the night, Trump told the crowd in Oklahoma that he had told his “people” to slow down Covid-19 testing across the country.

The White House has claimed Trump was joking. But his remarks are in line with a series of previous remarks he’s made expressing doubts about testing and its uncanny ability to increase the number of recorded cases.

Trump’s admission has shocked even some of his most strident critics, with the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie equating it to a murder confession:

In an interview with Fox News, Donald Trump has repeated the conspiracy theory that the recent protests “are all paid for”.

There are reports of police using pepper balls to disperse a crowd protesting outside the BOK Center, where Donald Trump held his rally tonight.

The Trump campaign had reported hundreds of thousands of people had signed up for tonight’s rally. There were definitely not that many in Tulsa, and there are reports that social media campaigns on campaigns including TikTok had been used to get people to claim tickets they had no intention of using. A member of the president’s campaign denied to CNN that was the case.

“We had legitimate 300,000 signups of Republicans who voted in the last four elections. Those are not [TikTok] kids. It was fear of violent protests. This is obvious with the lack of families and children at the rally. We normally have thousands of families,” the official told the broadcaster.

Trump went after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez twice in his speech tonight. As Ocasio-Cortez herself says, it’s interesting that the most powerful person in the United States sees a first-term member of Congress as one of his main opponents. Perhaps because she represents what many of his most loyal supporters fear.

A bit more on Trump’s use of racist language tonight. He called Covid-19 “kung flu” and then illustrated a fictional story about a break-in by describing the intruder as a “hombre”.

One significant person Trump did not mention this evening: George Floyd, whose killing by police have sparked an extraordinary few weeks of protest in the US. Mike Pence, who spoke before Trump, did mention Floyd and said there was “no excuse” for his death.