In Arizona, Trump has a redo of his Oklahoma rally

Low attendance at Trump's event in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday (only 6,200 of the venue's 19,000 seats were occupied) made headlines and overshadowed the president's comeback message. But on Tuesday, he recast that rally as a roiling success, calling it the "number one show in Fox history for a Saturday night."

Speaking to the young audience at a local megachurch, Trump tapped into campus culture wars on free speech to draw a divide between his supporters and protesters fighting against racism and police brutality following the death of George Floyd, an African American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis. Trump declared the students in the audience as the cultural defenders of not only his movement but also of American values as a whole, portraying Democrats as intolerant and "totalitarian."

The president condemned the removal of monuments for slave owners and Confederate leaders as a destruction of American history. He called the audience "smarter" than Democrats, who he said require "absolute conformity."

"They hate our history, they hate our values," Trump said. "Because our country didn't grow great with them, it grew great with you."

The president celebrated the thwarting of an attempt to pull down a statue of Andrew Jackson in front of the White House on Monday evening, repeating his frequent new line of being a "law and order" president.

"If you give power to people that demolish monuments and attack churches and seize city streets and set fire to buildings, then nothing is sacred and nothing is safe," Trump said. "We stopped them last night."

Protesters have been targeting monuments dedicated to historical figures that have advanced slavery or colonialism, asserting they are better remembered in history books and museums than celebrated with memorials.

But Trump characterized their attempts as effacing history, telling the crowd: "The left are not trying to promote justice and equality. [They are in] the pursuit of their own political power."

The president repeated a claim he made on Monday night that those who deface public monuments would receive 10 years in prison, according to the Veteran Memorials Preservation and Recognition. The act actually caps punishment for defacing memorials for service members on public land at either 10 years in prison, a fine or both.

The November presidential election is the battleground for the future of the country, Trump said. The president charged his audience to get him reelected as part of his culture fight.

"This is the choice of two futures," he said. "The left's vision of disunity and discord, or our vision of equal opportunity and equal justice."

The president included unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud via mail-in voting, claiming Democrats were trying to rig the election. Democrats have argued for more mail-in voting to prevent large crowds in polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump has previously told POLITICO that mail-in ballots are "my biggest risk" to reelection, and Republicans are fighting a legal battle to bar the expansion of voting options amid the pandemic.

He also slipped in a reference to the coronavirus as the "kung flu" to the booming cheer of the audience. Trump had used the slur during his Oklahoma rally over the weekend.

He took a jab at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who he said had danced "in the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco, long after I banned China from coming here," in a reference to his travel ban on foreigners from mainland China at the height of the coronavirus outbreak. San Francisco's Chinatown was founded in the 19th century, and many of its residents have families who have lived in the United States for several generations.

Trump started 10 minutes early on Tuesday - uncharacteristic for a president who routinely begins rallies as much as an hour late. His appearance came as Fox News was airing an interview with the president's former national security adviser John Bolton, whose tell-all book of his time in the White House makes damning accusations of corruption by Trump. Trump and his administration have condemned the book and tried to block its release.

The president also tapped into his rally staples on Tuesday, from blasting undocumented immigration to mocking his Democratic presidential rival, Joe Biden, as "sleepy Joe."