Did TikTok teens and K-Pop fans punk Trump’s comeback rally?
For more than a week before Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in three months on Sunday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 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.
“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 Sunday. 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 yesterday, Schmidt called the rally an “unmitigated disaster” — days after Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale tweeted that more than a million people requested tickets for the rally through Trump’s campaign website.
Inside the 19,000-seat BOK Centre in Tulsa, where Trump thundered that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before”, numerous seats were empty. Tulsa Fire Department spokesperson Andy Little said the city fire marshal’s office reported a crowd of fewer than 6200 in the arena. City officials had expected a crowd of 100,000 people or more in downtown Tulsa, but that never materialised.
Social media users who have followed recent events might not be surprised by the way young people (and some older folks) mobilised to troll the president. They did it not just on TikTok but also on Twitter, Instagram and even Facebook. K-Pop fans — who have a massive, coordinated online community and a cutting sense of humour — have become an unexpected ally to American Black Lives Matter protesters.
In recent weeks, they’ve been repurposing their usual platforms and hashtags from boosting their favourite stars to backing the Black Lives Matter movement. They flooded right-wing hashtags such as “white lives matter” and police apps with short video clips and
memes of their K-pop stars.