President Donald Trump held his first campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma after several months of being away from the campaign trail due to the pandemic. Following the rally, husband and wife White House advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are reportedly furious with Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale due to the underwhelming numbers.
The Guardian reports that Ivanka and Jared are reportedly “pissed” at Parscale because he was unable to uphold the number of rally attendees he promised. Parscale said that there would be large crowds at the BOK arena in Tulsa and that they had even built an overflow stage outside the venue. The Trump campaign also claimed that 12,000 people were coming, however, according to the Tulsa Fire Department who counted the number of attendees, only 6,200 came.
Parscale then attributed the underwhelming attendance to the rally over the weekend to the media warning everyone not to attend the rally because of both the ongoing protests and the pandemic. Parscale also criticized the media, especially journalists who are known critics of the Trump campaign.
Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and co-founder of anti-Trump PAC called The Lincoln Project, weighed in on the situation. Wilson said that both Ivanka and Jared have already been “signaling their displeasure to the media.”
Trump is currently falling behind former vice president Joe Biden in the polls as of late, most especially in battleground states.
As Parscale blames the underwhelming attendance rate at the Tulsa rally on the Black Lives Matter protests and the coronavirus pandemic, the real reason appears to be the young users of popular social media platform TikTok as well as Korean Pop fans. The users claimed thousands of tickets to the Tulsa rally only to purposely not attend. It all stemmed back to the Trump campaign urging young supporters to attend the rally by registering through TikTok.
Politicians and political analysts have further confirmed that young TikTok users and Korean Pop fans claimed the thousands of tickets in an attempt to disrupt the rally. Users have also shared screenshots using Tulsa zip codes to get tickets with no intention of attending.