Unsanitized: Death (Well, Actually, Trump) Stalks Tulsa

The rare comparison between a U.S. president and an unwelcome German visitor. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for June 20, 2020.

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The following is a guest edition of Unsanitized from Harold Meyerson, Prospect editor at large.

Tonight, the presidency of Donald Trump reaches its apotheosis with the president’s first 2020 campaign rally, a toxic mix of deadly germs and racist rage that he is inflicting on Tulsa. Even members of the coronavirus task force advised against this gathering. They were outvoted.

You might think Tulsa has suffered enough. It will soon commemorate the centenary of the white riot of 1921, when marauding bigots massacred hundreds of African Americans and all but destroyed their hitherto thriving community. It is currently enduring a spike in Covid-19 cases, which have risen by 140 percent in the past couple of weeks. Oklahoma now ranks second among the 50 states in the per capita rate of growth of coronavirus cases. Packing Tulsa’s BOK Center with 19,000 shouting Trump supporters, under no requirement to wear masks, will surely spread the virus to attendees, to the arena’s hapless employees, and to the surrounding community.

At the same time, Tulsa’s black community will be both celebrating Juneteenth and memorializing the massacre victims by protesting Trump and all his works, which could invite violence from the lumpen loonies of militias and white supremacy groups who Trump has summoned from the politically dead.

Read all of our Unsanitized stories

Has any notable visitor from afar ever dropped in on a city so manifestly spreading death in his wake?

Well, yes, at least in legend, and the tales spun from legend. One year after Tulsa’s white riot, in 1922, the brilliant German filmmaker F. W. Murnau made Nosferatu, the first great horror picture—for my money, still the greatest. It was the movies’ first treatment of the Dracula story, though in it, the Dracula character, embodied with terrifying aspect by Max Schreck, is named Nosferatu (derived loosely from the Romanian word Nesuferit, meaning “offensive” or “troublesome”). And, as in not the case in the subsequent Dracula films, Nosferatu neither stays in Transylvania nor confines his deadly compulsions to fatal neck-bites.

In Nosferatu, he travels on a ghostly ship to a placid 19th-century German town, bringing with him caskets full of diseased rats who spread the plague among the town’s panicked citizens. The film contains scenes that look almost predictive of what we’ve all gone through in recent weeks, as the burghers scatter to their homes when news of the plague is revealed, and as the streets grow quiet as the townspeople cower behind their doors.

Trump has reached the stage where comparisons to actual human beings no longer seem adequate. As the demagogue campaigner summons his unmasked hordes, he evokes no one so much as Murnau’s carrier of plague-bearing rats.

I’d be surprised if anyone has ever written that about a president of the United States.

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

85. Meanwhile, in the most important victory for transparency in world history, the Trump administration has relented and will release data on most PPP recipients. Critics have decided to focus on that rather than the $140 billion left in the program about to go bye-bye. Many will lose their jobs over this misplaced focus. Nancy Pelosi’s statement on this was rich: “Democrats stand with the American people and small businesses, and will continue to demand that the CARES Act’s historic investment of taxpayer money is used wisely and effectively to save lives and livelihoods.” She won’t demand that the PPP money is, you know, used, just used “wisely and effectively. And the demand for wise and effective use of CARES Act funds won’t be so high as to hire a bailout oversight chair.

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