- President
Donald Trump 's campaign manager has publicly pushed back on reports that K-pop fans and TikTokers helped tank Trump's Saturday rally by reserving thousands of tickets and not showing up. Brad Parscale said "leftists and online trolls" didn't "know what they're talking about or how our rallies work," and he blamed the low attendance on the "fake news media."- The Trump campaign had boasted of a huge interest in the event, saying that 1 million people indicated plans to attend.
- But other officials anonymously told The New York Times that many people who signed up for the event were not real supporters but online tricksters and that they likely helped inflate expectations.
- Fears about the coronavirus pandemic may have contributed to the low turnout, as Oklahoma recently reported a spike in new cases.
In public, the Trump campaign has adamantly denied reports that legions of TikTokers and K-pop fans helped tank President Donald Trump's big rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday.
"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," Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager, said in a statement on Sunday.
"Registering for a rally means you've RSVPed with a cell phone number and we constantly weed out bogus numbers, as we did with tens of thousands at the
But behind the scenes, campaign officials anonymously told The New York Times that many people who had signed up to attend the rally were not real Trump supporters but online tricksters, adding that they likely helped inflate expectations.
A campaign adviser told the newspaper that "troll data" — the information the pranksters used to book the tickets — could still be useful to the campaign, as it could be entered into a system to "tighten up the formula used to determine projected attendance for rallies" and screen for fake supporters.
After Trump returned to the White House, apparently crestfallen at the rally flop, reports emerged that for weeks, a legion of fans of Korean pop music, or
Before the event, the Trump campaign urged supporters to sign up for tickets to the event for free with their phone number, which it could then use to target them with various ads.
Thousands of K-pop fans and teens reportedly responded that they'd attend — many using temporary numbers — with no plans to actually go.
Parscale had boasted that about 1 million people signed up to attend the rally, billed as the president's comeback after the crises of the coronavirus pandemic and the anti-racism demonstrations over the death of George Floyd.
The campaign was so confident that the rally would be a sellout that it even planned for the president to deliver a speech outside to an overflow of supporters — who never showed up.
Tim Fullerton, an Obama administration official, told The Washington Post that the online movement likely helped warp the campaign's expectation of how many people would attend, leading to less of an effort to get real supporters to show up.
Fullerton said it probably "made it seem like there were more people interested than they thought," likely meaning the Trump campaign "did less to drive people to the event."
Fears about the coronavirus pandemic may be among the factors behind the low turnout. Oklahoma recently reported a spike in new cases, and public-health officials had said that holding the rally would pose significant risks.
Parscale is now under real pressure for the debacle; a campaign source told CNN that Trump's eldest daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — both senior advisers in the Trump administration — were furious with Parscale for the rally flop.
In his Sunday statement, Parscale blamed a familiar Trump campaign target: the news media.
"The fact is that a week's worth of the fake news media warning people away from the rally because of COVID and protestors, coupled with recent images of American cities on fire, had a real impact on people bringing their families and children to the rally," he said.