Did Tiktok teens, K-pop fans cause poor show at Trump campaign rally?
OAKLAND: Several US media outlets, citing multiple sources close to the White House, said President Donald Trump was “furious” after his re-election campaign in Tulsa, Oklahoma was marred by empty seats.
The White House had promised Saturday’s much-hyped event - Trump’s first rally in three months - would be flooded with up to 100,000 people, but large sections of the 19,000-capacity BOK Center were empty.
The local fire department said only about 6,200 people were present, according to US media, but campaign officials claimed at least 12,000 attended.
An outdoor event for the overflow crowd was cancelled because no one showed up, despite Trump’s team boasting of huge interest ahead of time and more than a million ticket requests.
Did teens, Tiktok users and fans of Korean pop music troll the president of the United States?
For more than a week before Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in three months on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, these tech-savvy groups opposing the president mobilised to reserve tickets for an event they had no intention of attending.
While it’s unlikely they were responsible for the low turnout, their antics may have inflated the campaign’s expectations for attendance numbers that led to Saturday’s disappointing show.
“My 16 year old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America’s teens,” veteran Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt tweeted on Saturday.
The tweet garnered more than 100,000 likes and many responses from people who say they or their kids did the same. Reached by telephone on Sunday, Schmidt called the rally an “unmitigated disaster” .
CNN had reported last Tuesday that a Tiktok video posted by Mary Jo Laupp, who uses the hashtag #Tiktokgrandma, was helping lead the charge. The video now has more than 700,000 likes.
Two K-pop fans who spoke to Reuters in Skype and phone interviews on Sunday said they had each registered for two spots, not using their real names and numbers. Em, a 17-year-old student in Kansas who only wanted to be identified by her username, said she had first heard about the effort on Tiktok. She said many of the original tweets sharing information about the rally had been deleted.
“I think it was partially the Tiktokers and the K-pop fans but also people are not as interested in Trump as he thinks they are,” she said.
Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, said the turnout was a sign of weakening voter support. “Donald Trump has abdicated leadership and it is no surprise that his supporters have responded by abandoning him,” he said.
The Trump campaign blamed the “fake news media” for “warning people away from the rally”. “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,” Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale wrote.
“Reporters who wrote gleefully about Tiktok and K-pop fans — without contacting the campaign for comment — behaved unprofessionally and were willing dupes to the charade,” he said.