President Donald Trump’s team for his re-election bid had denounced the claims that a campaign run by Tik-tokers and K-Pop fans was responsible for sabotaging his Saturday night’s Oklahoma rally. Teenagers from Tik-Tok community are believed to have booked tickets without any slight intent to show up in the event to produce lower than expected turnout.
Trump 2020 team have earlier claimed that around 1 million requests for tickets were received ahead of rally but insisted that bogus reservations were declined. The Bank of Oklahoma Center venue has a capacity of 19,000 and the event was also announced to be expanded to outside of the center but the plan fell through later. According to Tulsa fire brigade over 6,000 people have attended the event but President’s campaign organizers claim the figure was much higher.
The campaign director in a statement asserted that “phony ticket requests never factor in our thinking” as the passes were distributed on a first-come first-served basis. Brad Parscale also blamed the media and protesters for campaigning against the rally and doing propaganda against it.
“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,” Mr. Parscale said.
“Registering for a rally means you’ve RSVPed [confirmed attendance] with a cellphone number and we constantly weed out bogus numbers, as we did with tens of thousands at the Tulsa rally, in calculating our possible attendee pool.”
Former Republican strategist and a critic of Mr. Trump, Steve Schmidt, said teenagers across United States had intentionally ordered tickets and then dumped the event in order to produce empty seats in large numbers. His 16-year old daughter and her friends were among those faking interest in the event.
He in a tweet wrote: “My 16-year-old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America’s teens. @realDonaldTrump you have been failed by your team. You have been deserted by your faithful. No one likes to root for the losing team.”
A number of parents endorsed Schmidt’s claim and posted about their children involved in the bogus requesting.
House representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lauded the youngster and K-Pop fans for dissuading the Trump campaign by intelligent infiltration through her tweet. The notable progressive figure wrote: “Actually you just got Rocked by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign with fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID. Shout out to Zoomers. You all make me so proud.”
President Trump
Trump in his opening remarks criticized the protests saying there had been “very bad people outside, they were doing bad things”, but stopped short of elaborating. BLM activists were among the people who tried to flood the Republican’s rally.
On COVID-19, Trump said he had encouraged authorities to reduce testing adding that it is a double-edged sword” and led to more cases being detected.
“Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” he told the cheering crowd,” he addressed his supporters. “So, I said slow the testing down. They test and they test.”
Trump has previously uttered xenophobic remarks about the novel coronavirus calling it a Chinese virus and making veil mentions like “Kung Flu” that clearly appears to be a reference to its Chinese origin.
A WH official later said the President was “obviously kidding” about the testing of the infection in US. Taking a jab at his Democratic rival, the Republican described Joe Biden as “a helpless puppet of the radical left”.
“The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments – our beautiful monuments – tear down our statues and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and total control. We’re not conforming,” he told the crowd.
