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

Trump says Ice gets “rid of the worst scum on earth”, effectively calling undocumented immigrants criminals. He says his administration defends Americans and deports dangerous outsiders. “We’ve got to keep the White House,” he says. He says Joe Biden has never done anything and has only been “a vice-president or something”. Somewhere Mike Pence sheds a tear of shame.

The NFL comes up. He says “we shall never kneel for the national anthem”. This comes after Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, apologised this month for not supporting players who protested peacefully. This comment gets the biggest cheer of the night, and many in the crowd are on their feet.

Worth remembering when the analysis of whether tonight’s rally was half-empty or half-full starts:

Trump is on his second free-jazz riff of the evening. This one is an in-depth story about getting a new aircraft for Air Force One from Boeing; Angela Merkel appears at some point. It ends, surprisingly, with Trump being proved to be correct despite other people telling him he was wrong. This one is getting less traction from the crowd than the one about the time he drank a glass of water at West Point, possibly because it makes very little sense.

Trump says Joe Biden is “a puppet of the radical left”.

He says that a “bunch of maniacs” were outside the rally earlier so he could not attend an event outside. As reported by my colleague Oliver Laughland earlier, there was no evidence of violence from counter-protesters this evening outside the event.

He turns to “leftist radicals” statues of Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus being torn down. He says that anyone burning the American flag “should go to jail for a year”. He says he believes in freedom of speech but not “desecration”. Respect of the flag is something Trump has turned to recently, even turning on NFL quarterbacks about the subject.

“The unhinged leftwing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments, tear down our statutes, and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform their demands for absolute and total control,” he says. “We’re not conforming.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Tulsa, Black Lives Matter, is holding a small counter-event:

Trump says that he shook hands with some of the graduates at West Point last week, despite orders not to as he wanted to reward “these beautiful young people”. He is still on the ramp story, by the way.

The president turns to his appearance at the graduation ceremony for the US Military Academy at West Point last week. I can’t argue with his next statement that West Point’s setting is “beautiful”. He says he saluted every single graduate but all the “sick” media could do was pick up on his unsteady walk as he left the stage. It’s obviously an accusation that still stings a week later. He has now spent longer talking about this crucial piece of geopolitics than he did about the ailing economy, America’s healthcare system, a pandemic, police killings or civil unrest sweeping a divided nation. As a sidenote, Trump, as we know, is an expert at talking to his supporters and there are plenty of chuckles and cheers as he tells the story.

More racist language from Trump: he calls Covid-19 “Kung Flu”. Dismally, his comment is cheered.

He turns to the subject of calls to defund the police. He says: “It’s 1am in the morning and a ‘very tough hombre’ is trying to break into the house of a young woman whose husband is away, and the reply is ‘Sorry, this number is no longer in service’”. Aside from the racist imagery in that comment, very few people are seriously calling for the end to law enforcement altogether.