Swathes of empty seats at Trump rally ‘down to TikTok users and K-pop fans’

DONALD TRUMP’S campaign rally in Oklahoma was hit by a lower-than-expected attendance because of teenagers on TikTok and fans of Korean pop music, it has been claimed.

The US president, who is looking to secure a second term in November’s election, held his first major campaign event since Covid-19 shut down much of the country in Tulsa on Saturday.

But images from the rally, which was moved back a day from its original June 19 date, show swathes of empty spaces at the Bok Center, which seats 19,000 people. The empty seats were blamed on “radical protesters” and “apocalyptic media coverage” by Mr Trump’s campaign director, Brad Parscale.

But Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez replied, suggesting the low numbers were in fact down to a campaign on video-sharing app TikTok.

She tweeted: “Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID.”

The efforts to disrupt the rally numbers appear to have been started by Mary Jo Laupp, who on June 11 posted her anger at Mr Trump initially arranging the rally for the day of Juneteenth - a holiday marking the end of slavery in the US – in a city where a racist massacre took place in 1921.

In her TikTok video, Ms Laupp encouraged people to register for two free tickets to the event on the Trump campaign website but not turn up in a bid to keep the venue as empty as possible.

In response, users – many of them young people, known as Generation Z or Zoomers – posted videos of themselves in front of screens showing they had registered for tickets, while dancing to the Macarena.

The viral effort was amplified by a number of K-pop fan accounts.

An overflow area was set up outside the venue, but it was not needed.