Inside the campaign staff COVID outbreak at Trump's infamous Tulsa rally

Trump Tulsa rally.
(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

As with plenty of former President Donald Trump-related revelations, it turns out his infamous June 2020 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma — the one that was woefully underattended — may have been more of a train wreck than originally thought, according to an excerpt of journalist Jonathan Karl's forthcoming book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show published in Vanity Fair.

When multiple campaign staffers, who had partied together the night before, tested positive for COVID-19 the day of the rally, campaign leadership actually ordered the team to "STOP TESTING," Karl reveals. The directive arrived following an "embarassing" NBC News headline that broke the news of the staff infections. And Trump, for his part, was "furious."

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Brigid Kennedy

Brigid Kennedy worked at The Week from 2021 to 2023 as a staff writer, junior editor and then story editor, with an interest in U.S. politics, the economy and the music industry.