Monday the 15th is the 20th anniversary of the North–South Joint Declaration in Korea.  Reunification hasn’t been accomplished, and many outside observers believe that the government in the North is about to do something fairly radical and possibly even rash.  They’ve been ramping up their public pugnacity for the past few weeks, so it’s not an unreasonable supposition.

But presuming they don’t and nothing else horrific happens over the next week, I have a prediction to make — something that will be of great interest to most of my readers, having to do with a different commemoration entirely.

I’ve got a good idea what Donald Trump is going to talk about in Tulsa on the 20th.  And if you think it over, I’m pretty sure you will too.

On the off chance you haven’t been following — perhaps you’ve been staying with the Trappist monks for the past week or so?  Maybe a lunar vacation? — the Trump campaign rally that was planned in Tulsa on June 19th was moved to the 20th, ostensibly out of sympathy for the black community and scheduled memorials on “Juneteenth”.

(Editor:  Some major media sources are reporting this incorrectly.  May 31st through June 1st is the actual anniversary of the Tulsa race riot and massacre.  June 19th is the anniversary of the general order freeing all slaves in Texas back in 1865.  It may appear minor, but the historical events are too important to mistake.)

Some of the protest organizations are claiming a victory, having forced Trump’s campaign to reschedule until the day after.  I disagree.

It is my belief that this was tactical, and both the original date and the rescheduling were carefully designed in from the very beginning — a brilliant move, by the way.  I don’t know who his campaign managers are, but if “The West Wing” were real life I’d suspect Bruno Gianelli.

June 19th falls on a Friday.  I know it’s not L.A. or Chicago, but Friday afternoon traffic even in Tulsa ain’t nothing.  People are often wiped out at the end of the work day, and attendance at Trump’s rally would have been sparse and lackluster.  The date and location were chosen deliberately, because of course they were.  There are more than a hundred medium cities in the United States, and Oklahoma isn’t really in play this November, so the Tulsa Massacre and Juneteenth were intentional factors.

Donald Trump intends to appeal to black voters — possibly in a bid to force the Biden campaign to select either Stacey Abrams or Kamala Harris as candidate for Vice President (Abrams is seen by undecideds as whiny and a poor loser and Harris as sympathetic to law enforcement — Editor).  Several political organizations responded negatively, which may well create a backlash against a D.N.C. that some believe feels entitled to their votes without actually doing anything in exchange.  And so on.

In short, the change to the 20th was a major victory for Trump on at least four levels, and it has the advantage of being far more convenient to hold a rally on a Saturday anyway.

So here comes the prediction:  He’ll use the platform to talk about the horrors of riots, the necessity of militarized policing, the War On Drugs, fighting human trafficking (at least this bit is worthwhile), and his new Tough On Crime platform.  He’ll spend a long time talking about Tulsa in 1921 so he can deplore violence on national television.  It’ll be a version of fearmongering so gentle that it’ll come across like comfort.  It’ll look like sane, wise leadership in tough times.

That is, it will if Trump can stay on the text of his speech.  He’s had some trouble with that in the past.  Add to this that he’s notoriously self-willed and it’s safe to say that if anyone can mess this up it’s him.  But if he doesn’t, it’s going to play well in any state where there’s been looting in the past couple of weeks.

And that’s going to have one heck of an impact in November.

Bottom line:  Anyone who thinks 2020 is going to be a Democratic landslide should pay close attention to how this rally goes.

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TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

There’s a reason your news is biased. It’s because you want it to be. The reason I can tell is, people still read the Times and the Post even though they need to pay for the privilege but the number of people willing to even buy one coffee on this site is pretty slim. The number of people who share links to these posts is even smaller. We get what we pay for.

If you don’t like the CoffeeLink below, you might consider PayPal instead, perhaps setting up an automatic monthly subscription.  I’m told there’s a checkbox.