Listen to this articleUS President Donald Trump’s campaign boasted that one million people had registered to attend. The rally took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday but just over 6,000 attended the event. It offered a chance to kick-start Trump’s 2020 election campaign and demonstrates the enthusiasm his supporters still have for the president as his poll numbers slump. Trump was greeted with rows of empty chairs as more than two-thirds of the 19,000 capacity BOK arena was empty. An outdoor overflow area set up outside in anticipation of the large crowds was closed down when it was clear it would not be filled.
The Public Information Officer for the Tulsa Fire Department, Andrew Little informed a news outlet that the event management had counted turnout at 6,200 people. The Trump campaign management disputed that they counted 12,000 people through the metal detectors at the venue. The event is likely to have had a dampening effect on the notoriously crowd-sized obsessed president and his campaign. Some have speculated that the coronavirus may have kept people away. Users of the social media site and fans of Korean pop music claimed to have registered hundreds of thousands of tickets for the rally with no intention of attending.
Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale tweeted after the event and wrote, “Radical protestors, fueled by a week of apocalyptic media coverage, interfered with @realDonaldTrump supporters at the rally. They even blocked access to the metal detectors, preventing people from entering”. The representative AOC said, “Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok”. Trump largely brushed aside concerns regarding the coronavirus epidemic. He claimed that he had asked for testing to be slowed down because of the number of confirmed cases too high compared to other countries. He said, “Testing is a double-edged sword. We’ve tested now 25 million people. It’s probably 20 million people more than anybody else. Germany’s done a lot, South Korea’s done a lot”.
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