We’ll lead today with a little help from a song that should be on heavy rotation during the remainder of Donald Trump’s campaign. Neil Diamond’s, I Am I Said. I am… I said/To no one there/And no one heard at all/Not even the chair… In fairness to the president, it’s impossible to say for sure what the chairs heard, but there was definitely nothing blocking their line of sound. Of course, crowd size is meaningless in reality. But in Trump fantasyland, it’s everything. It was a lie about the inaugural crowd size that kicked off this presidency. But after planning an outdoor-overflow speech that never happened because no one was there, and drawing around 6,000 people to an arena that holds three times that many, Trump’s ill-advised return to the rally circuit was an epic fail. Even Putin was like, “Bro, I can only do so much…” Trump gives grievance-filled speech to unfilled arena as protests stay mostly peaceful.

+ Well I’m New York City born and raised/But nowadays/I’m lost between two shores/L.A.’s fine, but it ain’t home/New York’s home/But it ain’t mine no more… They say you can’t go home again. That will be especially true if there’s a warrant out for your arrest. Hence, the importance of strong turnouts in places like Tulsa. So how did a rally that Trumpians said had over a million ticket requests end up with six thousand attendees? NYT: TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally. “TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank.” (My kids promised me Father’s Day breakfast in bed and I’m still the only one awake. Maybe I should check Tik Tok.)

+ Did you ever read about a frog/Who dreamed of bein’ a king/And then became one/Well except for the names/And a few other changes If you talk about me/The story is the same one… The story’s the same one … up to that point. But there’s a final chapter where the king reverts back to a frog. Then the frog’s prosecuted to the full extent of the law by the Southern District of New York, and is thrown into prison after Adam Schiff delivers his closing argument—livestreamed to packed arenas across the country—to a jury made up entirely of immigrant epidemiologists and climate scientists. The administration’s covid response has been like boiling a frog. During the rally, Trump said he asked his team to do less testing. “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.'” The campaign tried to say he was joking. But we can see in his actions that he wasn’t. Atul Gawande: “He acknowledges what we’ve seen—active obstruction of testing in a pandemic which claimed 120K lives so far. If I did this for 10 people at my hospital, it’d be a crime.” (I used to call on cable networks to stop showing these campaign ads live. This one actually felt more like a Biden campaign ad.)

+ But I got an emptiness deep inside/And I’ve tried/But it won’t let me go/And I’m not a man who likes to swear/But I never cared/For the sound of being alone… Ok, that emptiness has a name. It’s called Narcissistic Personality Disorder. And you’ve got an extreme case. When Narcissus looks into the pond, he sees Donald Trump. And that’s not the sound of being alone. That’s the sound of a new podcast featuring Geoffrey Berman and Preet Bhahara being played on a continuous loop.

+“I am”… I cried/”I am”… said/I And I am lost and I can’t/Even say why. The being lost is one clue. The dry mouth is another. I’m gonna guess it’s the adderall. Whatever it is, it’s going to get a lot worse in the coming weeks as Trump feels more polling pressure. While I’ve had some fun in this section, this is probably the key takeaway from the event: The lawlessness and institution bashing are likely to accelerate following this Rally fail. And it was so bad heading into Tulsa that the President of the United States canned a prosecutor for working on cases that involve that president.