Historian Douglas Brinkley on Thursday evening predicted hat President Donald Trump’s Saturday evening Oklahoma rally will “look horrific” in history.
Speaking to CNN host Don Lemon, Brinkley said he was thinking back to when “Trump teargassed protesters in front of the White House” to take an awkward photo-op in front of a church while holding up a Bible. He said this weekend’s rally will not look good, especially since it is scheduled as coronavirus cases are “spiking in Oklahoma and Texas and Florida.”
“And going in without masks and doing an irresponsible thing like that, it’s going to look horrific…in American history,” Brinkley said before adding that “suddenly [Joe] Biden’s strategy of staying a little more low key for the time being really makes sense.”
The Trump campaign will reportedly pass out masks and hand sanitizer to attendees but will not require supporters to wear masks.
Brinkley also said Trump is “completely unraveling right now” and said that “the country has one thing uniting them, and that is a distrust and even a disdain for the Trump presidency at this juncture.”
An Associated Press-NORC poll released on Thursday evening found that just 39 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance. The poll also found that 67 percent disapprove of how Trump has handled race relations and 62 percent disapprove of how Trump has dealt with the the coronavirus crisis.
In addition, a majority of Americans in the poll believe that Trump “made things worse” in dealing with George Floyd’s death and the protests that followed after ex-officer Derek Chauvin killed Floyd.