Trump campaign says registration for the rally does not mean guaranteed entry to the event
President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, welcomed a fraction of the expected supporters on Saturday. Some of the no shows may be teenagers who have decided to confirm their attendance without intending to attend.
Over the past few days, people who oppose Trump have organized efforts on social media apps TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter to sign up for the rally, sometimes with fake names or email accounts. The message has spread among teenagers, especially fans of Korean pop music, who have recently turned their networks towards political causes. The memes on the TikTok video sharing app showed teenagers dancing in front of screenshots of their Trump rally entries. Lots of messages were set to the tune of the 1993 song “Macarena”, prompting others to repeat the gesture and make the meme viral.
It is impossible to know how many non-presentations during the rally can be attributed to the viral effort. Trump had nearly a million registrations, well beyond the capacity of the Bank of Oklahoma Center, which has 19,000 seats. The President planned to address the crowds of overflows at a stadium outside the arena, but it was not necessary. Only a few thousand people showed up – a result the campaign attributed to “radical protesters, fueled by a week of apocalyptic media coverage,” according to a tweet from Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager.
Yet online, the opposition has declared victory. “My 16-year-old daughter and her friends from Park City, Utah, have hundreds of tickets,” wrote Steve Schmidt, a political strategist who worked for President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, on Twitter. “You were cheated by American teens.” Other parent publications have also made similar statements.
Elijah Daniel, a music artist by the name of Lil Phag, started asking his subscribers on TikTok a few days ago to book tickets and spread the word. On Saturday, he followed up on Twitter, asking how many of them had. Dozens responded by saying they had reserved a few tickets, with a joke apology for why they couldn’t go – from walking their plants to feeding their rocks.
“Seeing how this generation got up and got so creative in their fight for what they believe in is great to see,” said Daniel in an interview, thanking K-Pop fans for giving him the idea. .
The Trump campaign said registration for the rally did not mean guaranteed entry to the event, and no one had received an actual ticket.
“Leftists are always wrong in thinking they are smart,” said campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh. “Registering for a rally only means that you answered with a mobile phone number. Each rally is general admission and entry is first come, first served. But we thank them for their contact details.”
It was not just young people. Mary Jo Laupp, who calls herself a TikTok grandmother, said the rally was “a slap in the face for the black community”. She told subscribers that the campaign offered two free tickets per cell phone number, and advised people to sign up and just reply “STOP” to text messages. Her message was liked 704,500 times and shared 135,000 times.
The Trump campaign relies on rally registration data to target effective advertising before election day. On June 14, Parscale tweeted that Tulsa was “the largest rally data collection and registration ever by 10x”. At least some of this data is likely to be ineffective.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
