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

Bill Mitchell, a long-time supporter of the president, said it was the best speech he had ever seen Trump give:

Meanwhile, David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s election strategist said the president laid out a simple message of fear to his supporters tonight, that “the nation is besieged by radical mobs and Biden is their puppet”. He added on Twitter that “this is Trump’s problem. Biden is culturally incovenient. He is not scary enough to voters Trump needs to scare. So his alternative line is that Biden is the puppet of scary people.”

Oliver Laughland is in Tulsa for us. Trump repeatedly said during his speech that counter-protesters made life difficult for his supporters tonight. From where Oliver is, the crowd seems pretty calm

Tulsa police have added that there has been no trouble at the protests this evening:

A few thoughts on Twitter and elsewhere:

The president says American will keep “winning, winning, winning” and the “best is yet to come”. Together, he says, “we will make America wealthy again ... safe again and great again”. And with that familiar comment, the president leaves the stage to cheers.

Trump says he will keep “America out of foolish foreign wars” if re-elected. He then says the US “will be the first nation to land on Mars” before repeating his promise to defend the right to keep arms, adding it’s “damned nice” to have guns when “lunatics” are protesting on the streets.

Trump says “the plague” has hurt the economy which was “the envy of the world” but America is coming back. “Retails sales: the greatest single numbers in history,” he says. He then returns to blaming China for Covid-19 and he predicts the economy will come back in October as the election approaches. He says that progress will be hurt if the Democrats are elected, but if he wins next year will be “the greatest in history” for the economy.

Trump says he has saved “millions of lives” during the pandemic and says it’s now time “to get back to work” even though cases of Covid-19 are rising in many states.

He then lists how he has helped the black community, working with black businesses and historically black colleges and universities. This, presumably, is part of the president’s play to say he is uniting the country, rather than dividing it.

Trump says “our country will be destroyed” if Biden is elected in November. Trump says he has done “more for the black community in four years than Joe Biden has done in 47 years.” He says “racial justice begins with the retirement of Joe Biden”. This comment gets huge cheers.

For further reading on what Trump has done for racial justice, read the following:

Trump returns to the subject of energy to the crowd in Oklahoma, a state whose economy relies heavily on the energy sector. He says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will shut down the energy sector and, this is an interesting one, ban airplanes. He also returns to one of his pet peeves, wind turbines.

He then turns to Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman from Minnesota. Omar is an American citizen but he refers to “her country” as Somalia. There are loud boos for Omar, who is Muslim.

Trump says “an emboldened left will launch a full scale attack on American life” if Biden wins November’s election. He says they “will expel anyone who disagrees with them, they call you a racist, they don’t like religion ... they want to take away your guns”. Loud boos from the crowd as he finishes that part of the speech.

The president then returns to the importance of making sure the supreme court justices are conservatives by electing him in November.

A White House official said that an earlier comment from Trump in the speech, when he said he told “my people” to “slow down the testing” was a joke.

Here’s the full quote: “When you do testing to that extent, you are gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down please. They test and they test. We have tests that people don’t know what’s going on.”