As BOK Center employees worked to mitigate risk of COVID-19 spread at the President's June 20 rally, his reelection staff set about removing safety warnings.
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...
The stickers were a mandatory component of VenueShield, ASM continued stickering every other seat when something unexpected happened: “The campaign went through and removed the stickers,” says Thornton.
A video created by a third party and reviewed by Billboard shows Trump staffers methodically walking the aisles of BOK Center and peeling the three-inch square stickers from thousands of chairs ahead of the “Make America Great Again” rally. (Trump’s campaign did not respond to Billboard’s request for comment.)
The sticker episode concluded an anxiety-filled week for BOK Center staff wherein hundreds of Trump campaign workers inside the building inconsistently followed basic safety protocols like wearing masks and social distancing. Several days before the event, ASM asked the campaign to submit a safety plan in writing, but the campaign never fulfilled the request.
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."
Now much of Trump’s campaign staff, including campaign manager Brad Parscale, is in “quasi-quarantine”...
“In a public health crisis like this we need to make sure we are following the advice of medical experts and we are not doing things for politics, or doing things to impress people or whatever last Saturday’s performance was all about,” Crow said.
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Meanwhile cases of COVID-19 in Tulsa are rapidly increasing. On Thursday, 438 new cases were reported in the state, a 70% increase over the previous day, which set a record with 259 new cases. Mayor Bynum told the Tulsa World newspaper he is now considering making mask use mandatory in public and temporarily banning all events with more than 250 people...
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ASM is not finished with Trump -- the Republican National Convention has been moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida, where ASM manages all seven city-owned venues including VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena where much of the televised program will take place. A recent poll by the University of North Florida poll showed that 58% of residents oppose holding the convention in Jacksonville.
“We're going to be working with the same Trump campaign staff that we worked with in Tulsa,” Thornton says...
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