Trump’s first presidential campaign rally held at Tulsa fell well short of the expected number of attendees as Tik-Tok videos and tweets asking people to register for seats to prevent people from registering for the rally went viral. The rally allocated seats on a first come first serve basis and as such did not account for the sheer number of people who’d registered to prevent seats from filling up.
Mr Trump had said at least one million people were expected to attend. But the Trump 2020 team denied the online campaign had affected numbers.
The team's campaign director said in a statement that "phony ticket requests never factor into our thinking" as entry to rallies is on a first-come first-served basis. Brad Parscale blamed the media and protesters for dissuading families from attending.
Despite Trump's campaign anticipating large crowds, the 19,000-seat arena at Tulsa's Bank of Oklahoma Center was far from full and plans for him to address an outside "overflow" area were abandoned.
The holding of the rally caused widespread outrage for a multitude of reasons. Prime amongst them was that constant coronavirus fear along with the rally being held on “Juneteenth” the celebration of the end of US slavery as well as the location of the event-Tulsa being the site of one of the greatest racist massacres, all in the face of constant inaction by the Donald Trump government to bring about any form of systemic change with respect to Law Enforcement with BLM protests continuing into their second week.
Tik-tok users, K-pop fans, teens and BLM protestors including eminent media personages such as Eric Andre and Snoop Dogg were amongst those calling for people to fill up the stadium with as many fake tickets as possible. K-pop fans and their assorted community have been at the forefront of the movement as “allies”, including disrupting police communications and flooding social media platforms with pro BLM media.
Trump’s Statement
In his opening remarks, Mr Trump said there had been "very bad people outside, they were doing bad things", but did not elaborate. Black Lives Matter activists were among the counter-protesters to gather outside the venue before the event.
Trump at the Tulsa Rally
On the coronavirus response, Mr Trump said he had encouraged officials to slow down testing because it led to more cases being discovered. He described testing as a "double-edged sword".
"Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases," he told the cheering crowd. "So I said 'slow the testing down'. They test and they test."
The coronavirus, Mr Trump said, had many names, including "Kung Flu", a xenophobic term that appears to be a reference to China, where Covid-19 originated.
A White House official later said the president was "obviously kidding" about Covid-19 testing.
Taking aim at his Democratic presidential rival, Mr Trump described Joe Biden as "a helpless puppet of the radical left".
Trump continued his belligerent rant when he touched on anti-racism protests - and the toppling of statues - which began after the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis.
"The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalise our history, desecrate our monuments - our beautiful monuments - tear down our statues and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and total control. We're not conforming," he told the crowd.
Response across the board
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive figure, praised the young people and K-pop fans she said had "flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations".
It is unclear how many of the hundreds of thousands of ticket reservations touted by the Trump campaign were fake, but one TikTok video from 12 June encouraging people to sign up for free tickets to ensure there would be empty seats at the arena has received more than 700,000 likes.
After news of the smaller crowd numbers emerged, the account's owner Mary Jo Laupp praised the response, telling young people who were too young to vote: "Remember that you, in doing one thing and sharing information, had an impact."
As a whole, this shows more clearly than ever that a continuation of brash belligerence that Trump’s campaign has become synonymous with is no longer acceptable to the vast majority of the populace in the face of ever-increasing troubles.
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