So Donald Trump’s much awaited campaign rally in Tulsa came and went, and needless to say.. it was a wee bit underwhelming. Okay fine, it was hella underwhelming. The president’s supposedly triumphant return to Tulsa, Oklohoma was supposed to be packed to the brim. The president himself boasted on Twitter that a million had registered to attend. The official number stood at 6200.
Don’t get me wrong, 6200 is still quite a number. It’s just a smidge short of a million. 993,800 to be exact. So what on earth happened exactly? Well, believe it or not, the row of empty blue seats could actually be because of TikTok. Yup.
As you’d expect, social media has had an absolute field day with the low turn out, and it turns out that a social media campaign by TikTok users and K-Pop stans is probably the reason so little people turned up. Teenagers across America allegedly snapped up thousands upon thousands of tickets without actually intending to attend.
Gotta hand it to the Gen Z, they sure know how to make a statement. While authorities have been unable to confirm just how many ticket reservations were fake, this TikTok video encouraging people to just sign up for free tickets and not attend already has almost a million likes on the platform.
@maryjo.laupp Did you know you can make sure there are empty seats at Trump’s rally? BLM.
Even former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt took to Twitter to confirm as much.
https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1274484153963016193
Of course, there’s no way to say with certainty that TikTok teens and K-Pop stans were the sole cause of the low turn out. With Donald Trump as president, it can get easy to forget that there’s a pandemic out there and with the rally being the first of its kind to be held since the US went into lockdown, maybe people just decided against attending last minute in fear they catch the virus.
Of course, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, blamed the usual suspects.
“Leftists and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking they somehow impacted rally attendance, don’t know what they’re talking about or how our rallies work,”
“Registering for a rally means you’ve RSVPed [confirmed attendance] with a cellphone number and we constantly weed out bogus numbers, as we did with tens of thousands at the Tulsa rally, in calculating our possible attendee pool.”
Brad Parscale, Trump 2020 Reelection Campaign Manager
We may never know what the real reason was for the stunning lack of attendance, but we’re pretty sure Parscale should start looking for a back up job to fall back onto when he inevitably gets fired.
