In Tulsa, Trump Campaign Subverted Social Distancing One Sticker at a Time

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/politics/9409901/trump-tulsa-rally-removed-coronavirus-distance-stickers?utm_campaign=2020-06-26&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_term=biz_breakingnews&fbclid=IwAR0CVbyNkCoVzzjjsNjjSINT-VI0s-wUA5SmW-XD0GPJo4WSHlaQzJt7kHY


6/26/2020 by Dave Brooks


Hours before President Donald Trump took the stage last Saturday at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for his first rally in the COVID-19 era, arena workers were busy labeling thousands of seats with “Do Not Sit Here Please!” stickers to promote social distancing, part of a new safety protocol at the arena known as VenueShield.

Campaign staff quickly radioed over to an executive at ASM Global and asked the arena to stop labeling the seats. In fact, "they also told us that they didn't want any signs posted saying we should social distance in the venue," says Doug Thornton, executive vp for ASM Global, who oversees nearly 100 arenas across five continents for the venue management company created by the 2019 merger of AEG and SMG.

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While the Trump campaign undermined arena mitigation efforts to protect attendees from the coronavirus, it did take steps to limit its own liability by requiring rally attendees to sign away their rights to sue if they contracted COVID-19.

"We know that eight Trump campaign staff members that were here tested positive for the coronavirus and we know that two of them were intermingling with the people in the arena," said Tulsa Police Department corporal David Crow during a Tulsa Public Facilities Authority meeting Tuesday. "Obviously, we know that that event probably triggered some type of broader infection."

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While organizers faced criticism for staging a rally during a pandemic, Thornton says ASM had no legal basis to stop the event. The state’s Republican governor, its nine state supreme court justices and Tulsa’s Republican mayor signed off on the event and said it had a legal right to move forward -- although mayor G.T. Bynum later said he would have supported ASM Global if it had canceled the rally, prompting mayoral aide Jack Graham to resign in protest.

“The mayor’s lack of leadership could have killed someone, that’s a redline for me,” Graham tells Billboard.

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