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TODAY'S HEADLINES:

Donald Trump threw a rally in Tulsa on Saturday evening, and it was a total dud. Coronavirus concerns and some shrewd maneuvers by teens on social media combined to make the administration think it was getting a record crowd, when only a few thousand showed up.

Meanwhile, Trump made it official and fired Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who’s prosecuted several cases against his inner circle.

And lastly, even the White House admits that the fall could bring a very dire spike in COVID-19 infections. Cases are on the rise in 18 states already, and the projections for coming months don’t look good.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

Teens Help Sink Trump Rally

Donald Trump tried his very hardest to get another hit of that old rally feeling this weekend, but fell massively short.

The massive crowd the Trump team was predicting in Tulsa on Saturday didn’t really show up. Before the rally, Trump’s campaign boasted that it would completely fill Tulsa’s BOK Center, which seats more than 19,000 people. On the day of, only 6,200 showed up, according to Tulsa’s Fire Marshal.

Part of this huge gap might have to do with a massive social media prank pulled by teenagers on Tiktok and Korean pop music fans, who directed followers to sign up en masse for spots at the rally to make the campaign think they were pulling huge numbers. Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale appears to have bought it hook line and sinker, claiming last monday that they’d gotten more than one million requests for a ticket.

Those fake registrations wouldn’t have necessarily taken spots from Trump fans, as the rally was free and you could just walk in -- no mask required!. Still, they certainly delivered an ego-blow to the Trump baby-brigade, who spent most of the weekend blaming protesters and trolls for keeping attendance low. Sure, it’s a far cry from an electoral victory, but anything that makes that moron-in-chief feel shame is probably a net win.

Trump Fires Berman

Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is out. Why is he out, you may ask? Well, Berman had the inconvenient habit of investigating and prosecuting several members of Trump’s inner circle, including former legal fixer Micheal Cohen.

Trump has been gunning for Berman for a while, and late on Friday night, his pet Attorney General Bill Barr tried to get Berman to step down. Berman refused, forcing Barr into an awkward position -- he’s not used to direct defiance.

Barr was trying to replace Berman with a transparent Trump crony, SEC chairman Jay Clayton, last seen golfing with the president in New Jersey last weekend. Berman wasn’t having any of it.

So Barr had to go above his head, instead saying that Trump was firing Berman instead of just replacing him. Berman agreed to go this time, because instead of Clayton, his longtime deputy Audrey Strauss would be taking over.

Strauss is ostensibly an actual public servant, like Berman, so it’s highly possible that Barr will be coming for her next, but for the time being she’s promised to continue Berman’s investigations.

The New York Times reports that Barr wasn’t able to strongarm Clayton into the spot because multiple Republican Senators indicated that the corruption apparent was too obvious even for them, and they wouldn’t confirm him.

Man, if what you’re trying to pull is too sketchy for Lindsey Graham, you’re really doing something wrong.

Government Braces For Fall Covid Spike

The coronavirus is still spreading and in some cases increasing drastically. California reported 4,515 new cases on Sunday -- the highest increase in a single day in that state. 12 other states also hit their record for new cases in the past week.

What this means is that this thing is going to hit the rest of the country hard, despite the fact that it’s a bit more under control in hot zones like NYC. But the parts of the country who reopened way before their peak show no signs of attempting to put new restrictions in place, meaning things are going to get much worse. While Trump is convinced the whole thing is going to go away, Peter Navarro, the White House director of trade and manufacturing policy said on CNN that the government is quote “doing everything we can,” endquote to get the country ready for another spike in the fall. It’s hard to take a quote like that at face value considering the administration’s abysmal record so far, but at least someone in the building is willing to admit there’s still work to do.

The good news is overall deaths are still down. But new infections have risen 15 percent nationally over the last two weeks, which means the toll could start to climb back up as patients get sicker. Epidemiologists now aren’t saying the disease will come in waves, but continue to spread like a quote “forest fire” endquote. Epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm told NBC quote: “I don’t think this is going to slow down. I think that wherever there’s wood to burn, this fire is going to burn it.”

And if there’s one thing Trump’s shown so far, it’s that he doesn’t care who he feeds to the flames.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department shot and killed 18-year-old Andres Guardado on Thursday. Guardado was working as a security guard at an auto shop, and ran from police who showed up responding to reports of a man with a gun. Deputies pursued him and killed him, claiming he was armed. His killing has sparked a fresh round of protests across the city.

The New York Times reports that after Derek Chauvin was arrested for the murder of George Floyd, the superintendent of the jail he was taken to ordered only white officers to supervise him. According to complaints filed by multiple staffers of color, the superintendent prevented them from even being on the same floor as Chauvin, solely because of the color of their skin.

A new, strange detail emerges from the devastating shooting rampage in Nova Scotia, Canada in April. According to Macleans, the shooter withdrew $475,000 Canadian dollars in cash using the same procedures the Canadian police use to get cash to confidential informants -- but the cops there claim they had no “special relationship” with the killer.

And finally, it was the hottest day ever recorded in the Arctic circle on Saturday, as Verkhoyansk, Siberia hit 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The reading hasn’t been fully verified yet, but either way, that kind of heat in the Arctic circle is a pretty dire warning that despite our other global woes, climate change is only getting worse.

That’s it for the Majority Report’s AM Quickie today! We’ll have some slightly more fun topics this afternoon than the earth’s gradual heat death and police brutality, so keep your eyes on YouTube and your favorite podcast app for the show.

June 22, 2020 - AM Quickie

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Jack Crosbie

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn