Donald Trump intended to restart his campaign in Tulsa with a spectacular event. He confidently claimed that one million people had requested tickets for the event. It would be incredible!
The plan was for Trump and Pence to speak at an outdoor rally for 40,000 people, then move indoors to the BOK Arena to speak to a packed house of 19,000 people.
But the outdoor rally was canceled when only a few dozen people showed up. Inside the arena, according to the Tulsa Fire Department, there were fewer than 6,200 people. The entire upper deck was almost completely empty.
What happened to the Trump base? Why did the campaign say that one million people had requested tickets?
The New York Times credits activist teens, who sabotaged the Trump rally using social media to urge contemporaries to flood the campaign with requests for tickets.
TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.
The trend quickly spread on TikTok, where videos with millions of views instructed viewers to do the same, as CNN reported on Tuesday. “Oh no, I signed up for a Trump rally, and I can’t go,” one woman joked, along with a fake cough, in a TikTok posted on June 15.
Thousands of other users posted similar tweets and videos to TikTok that racked up millions of views. Representatives for TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,” said the YouTuber Elijah Daniel, 26, who participated in the social media campaign. “K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want.”
Many users deleted their posts after 24 to 48 hours in order to conceal their plan and keep it from spreading into the mainstream internet. “The majority of people who made them deleted them after the first day because we didn’t want the Trump campaign to catch wind,” Mr. Daniel said. “These kids are smart and they thought of everything.”
Brian Stelter of CNN had the story. A grandmother in Iowa named Mary Jo Laupp posted a video on Tik-Tok that encouraged viewers to order tickets to the rally, but not show up. She says she had only 700 followers but the video went viral and reached at least 700,000 viewers. She thinks that a great many young people took her advice, even teens too young to vote.
No one knows for sure, but many requests for tickets may have been generated by Laupp’s video. That may explain why the campaign expected hundreds of thousands to pour into Tulsa.
Trump must have been shaken by the humiliatingly meager turnout. His performance was lackluster. The old lines didn’t work anymore. He can’t say “Build the Wall and Mexico will pay for it,” because even diehard Trumpers know that Mexico will not pay for it. He can’t say “Lock her up!” because that’s ancient history. He can’t lead chants of “Drain the Swamp” because he has created his own Swamp of lobbyists and put them in charge of federal agencies.
All he has left in his arsenal is divisiveness, rage, racism, and nativism. His most militant fans will stick with him to the bitter end, clutching their Confederate flags. To most Americans, he has become a menace, a national embarrassment, and a humorless bore.
Four more months.
“Why did the campaign say that one million people had requested tickets?” Because if Trump’s lips are moving he’s lying.
The place looked kind of dead. Trump should have hired that minister from Baton Rouge who spoke about the issue of the Robert E Lee school’s name being changed. He could have livened things up.
0.6%…😂🤣😹😅😆🤪🤠😛
I told my teenage sons they should feel inadequate, look at what good their peers are doing! 😘
The comedy never ends! And it’s international!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-farage-private-jets_n_5ef12513c5b6b30610066938
The gift that never stops giving:
Here’s the thing, the TikTok trolling almost certainly didn’t change the actual number of people who showed up and got into the rally. Since the Trump campaign admits people on a “first come, first enter” basis and always offers unlimited numbers of tickets, it doesn’t matter for that how many tickets they pass out.
However, the trolling did have some very important effects. It certainly did lead the campaign to ramp up expectations ahead of the rally for big crowds, which were illusions created by the fake “demand” for tickets. This has had an unquestionable demoralizing effect on Trump, his campaign, and his supporters. It also undermined the other goal of these rallies, one that the campaign has admitted is vital to them: gathering information. They mine the ticket requests for their databases on potential voters/donors. Even though they did some basic screening with an RSVP call system, hundreds of thousands of these trolling ticket requests seem to have gotten through anyway. That means that the data they gathered is basically useless as is, being full of false or partially false information and leading to people (if it does at all) who will never be Trump voters/donors. Any fundraising, GOTV, advertising, etc. effort based on it will be wasting a lot of the campaign’s time, effort, and money. They can try to clean the data up, but that will require them to expend their own manpower or hire a firm to do it, both of which also mean time, effort, and/or money down the drain. Their only other choice is to scrap the whole data set, which means one of their main goals for the rally has been sent down the drain. This is a lose/lose situation for them, all created by an activist grandmother and an army of Zoomers and Millennials on social media.
Please don’t call the TikToc campaign a “prank”. TicTok grandma herself said it was a protest. These kids do not approve of Trump’s racism and this was their virtual protest. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/tiktok-challenge-trump-rally/
And big thanks to Mary Jo Laupp for getting the whole campaign going and to the many others mostly teens who participated.
I signed up for two ticket for the ego Trump rally and put in my landline home phone number. Up came a place to enter a code which was supposed to be sent to my phone. I put in some fake stuff and the reply told me that the code was only five digits.
Dang. I SO much wanted to attend. For some reason that darn code never showed up on my landline phone. 😜😢
That last line!!!! Oh. My. Lord. That is good writing.
6,200 out of 19,000.
I guess that’s fully packed for socially-distanced human cows. 🐄🐄🐄
I am the proud parent of a “Never Trumper” who bought a ticket for the rally. The older generations have always thought that teens and very young adults were/are stupid and uneducated, but when youth have a purpose and a goal, there is nothing that will stop them.
Amen to this!!!
NEW AD: @realDonaldTrump admitted tonight that he purposely slowed down #COVID19 testing because it was “politically convenient.” Trump held back testing and Americans DIED. And we’re going to make sure voters know.
#TulsaTrumpRallyhttps://twitter.com/i/status/1274548146262151168
Finally, some GREAT news. Maybe this will start a trend and turn TrumpEekStanThinSkin into the stumbling, trembling, endless joke he should be.
What will Trump do, sign an executive order declaring that everyone on Tik Tok is a terrorist?
Since it is overt, this seems to be an interesting protest. Whether we want this type of protest becoming the way we neutralize the effects of social media that favor our opponents is another matter. How do we want our social media to react with the differences in society?
I think the fact that this was overt is the major point. Trolls that cannot be traced to somebody’s grandmother seem inherently worse.
Team Trump Says It Was a COVID Testing ‘Joke.’ His Own Health Officials Aren’t Laughing.
Published Jun. 22, 2020 3:24AM ET
The president said he wanted to slow down coronavirus testing. White House aides say it was for laughs. Others find it not funny at all.
White House officials and President Donald Trump loyalists tried on Sunday to walk back remarks he made over the weekend in which he told rally-goers that he had asked officials to slow COVID-19 testing so as to decrease the number of confirmed cases in the U.S.
“He was obviously kidding,” one White House official told The Daily Beast. Peter Navarro, senior adviser to Trump, told Fox News on Sunday that the president’s words were “tongue-in-cheek” and not meant to be taken seriously.
But two officials working on the coronavirus response within the Trump administration, as well as state officials and experts in emergency response, told The Daily Beast that they did not take the president’s remarks lightly. Whether facetious or not, they argued, the casual indifference Trump displayed towards testing at his Tulsa rally only reaffirmed that his administration was not prepared when the pandemic response hit—and may still not be.
“I always feared this was what was happening,” said one state health official who coordinates with the federal government on testing. “But his speech last night really made it seem like maybe this is the reason why they were slow to get us the resources we needed to do the testing.”…
https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-trump-says-it-was-a-covid-testing-joke-his-own-health-officials-arent-laughing?source=email&via=desktop
The only real joke we have in the United States is Trump and the people willfully serving him on bended knees. He and his followers are demented joke on the citizens of the United States and rest of the world.
Most tasteless joke ever.
The worst joke. Finally, Trump is “best” at something.
Bob Shepherd: Canadians are recognizing the stupidity of Trump, Fox and Americans who support the worst Republican candidate who won the WH.
What Americans don’t know… should worry us
Bruce Anderson: Our polling suggests that Trump’s leadership has made many Americans less aware of America’s standing in the world, and more open to off-the-wall ideas
By Bruce Anderson
June 22, 2020
…The lack of a common fact base makes it easy for people to imagine what they want to imagine. Right now, with racial divides widening, America feuding with most of its allies, an economy stumbling, a deficit at unprecedented levels, and a pandemic that has killed 120,000 and remains out of control in many areas…80 per cent of Republicans think Trump has made America greater.
A majority of Republican voters believe their country has better controls against the spread of coronavirus than Canada does. But the virus has killed 361 people for every million Americans. In Canada, the mortality rate is 225 per million people.
It’s tempting to wonder what’s the big problem if American pride and narcissism make people less aware of the facts of the world around them.
But if you live in Canada, once likened to being a mouse in bed beside an elephant the risks are not so easy to joke about as they once were. A similar but more apt metaphor of Trump’s America is John Mullaney’s horse running free in a hospital.
The mood in America has worsened. America has become richer but angrier. More limited in its understanding of the world and more divided internally. Half see a serious chance of another civil war.
What could go wrong for Canada? Half of Republican voters would go along with abandoning NORAD, roughly a third would support building a wall and putting troops along the Canadian border. Happily, most Americans are against invading Canada to get at our resources. But stop and think about the fact that only 56 per cent of Americans strongly oppose the idea….
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/what-americans-dont-know-should-worry-us/
President Trump will visit Yuma, Arizona, tomorrow to mark completion for the 200th mile of border wall system between the United States and Mexico. “Trump will tour the border wall and thank U.S. Border Patrol and law enforcement for their efforts,” The Associated Press reports.
Arizona’s rates of infection are rising. Hmmmm. Trump doesn’t wear a mask!! Tulsa’s rates were also going up when he had his ego rally.
Maybe one day he will figure out that the COVID-19 isn’t a joke.
His first term nearly finished and he has built a 200-mile Wall!
The clever are sawing through it. What a waste of money!
President Donald Trump wants to paint the US-Mexico border wall black, a proposal that could cost at least $500 million.
I guess the color black will keep smugglers from cutting through the wall. It also will keep people from climbing over the wall. [Trump has a unique way of thinking about everything.]
Bravo to the activist teens! Thankfully they understand what another four years with the asshole in the OVAL would mean for their futures. Keep up the activism…..
✊🏻✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿
This comes from Patriotic Times with the headline: Fake News Called Trump Rally a Flop — Here’s The Truth
Katrina Pierson
✔
@KatrinaPierson
I keep seeing FAKE NEWS reporting that there wasn’t an outside audience at the #TulsaRally but from where I sat, you could have fooled me! #TulsaTrumpRally
NYT:
Two campaign aides who attended President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday tested positive for the coronavirus, bringing to eight the number of staffers who have tested positive in recent days.
Gee. If they hadn’t been tested, they would be just fine. It’s that testing that is the problem.
He blamed it on attendees being scared away by the leftist protesters. Ha!
So a bunch of sandal-wearing, poster carrying, masked liberals scared away his armed, fearless, maskless, goosestepping, red-MAWA hat wearing supporters away.
Wait, What?: But Patriotic Times claims that attendees being scared away was fake news. Trump had MANY, MANY people outside waiting to hear him speak. There was NO shortage of people!
Look at the huge crowd waiting to get in and couldn’t.
It is no wonder that some people believe Trump is the greatest thing since the invention of electricity. It is all this fake news working to make him look bad that is the problem.
Trump supporters have their OWN media that glorifies him. Facts never matter. THAT is a major problem for this country.
I just received this email from a friend of mine who lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It is telling what many around the world think of our Great Leader:
Hope you are keeping safe and well full stop yes we are living in very interesting times so to speak. What’s going on in the u.s. is making the rest of us quite worried. However with any luck the real nut bars will catch covid. Maybe even the great Cheato who is not really doing a great job of representing the US? I wonder how that would play out.
Keep well and enjoy the summer as much as you can.
Big hugs from KL
Trump wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning: “I have authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison, per the Veteran’s Memorial Preservation Act, or such other laws that may be pertinent… This action is taken effective immediately, but may also be used retroactively for destruction or vandalism already caused. There will be no exceptions!”
Dummy Donald doesn’t know or doesn’t care that he cannot make laws and act as the judge and jury.
Only Congress does that.
And if the laws are already on the books, then all law enforcement has to do is catch the alleged vandals in the act and arrest them. Then it is up to a judge and possibly a jury to find the alleged vandal guilty and determine how long they spend in jail if they go to jail.
For Trumpty Dumpty, this is just more chest-thumping and roaring as the liar in chief pretends to act tough and not reveal how much of a coward he is.
TrumpEekThinSkin should launch a new reality show: “Who is the Biggest Bully and Coward of them All”.
The US Constitution and the laws of the nation/states are nothing but toilet paper to him. Used when convenient and then throw away.
I agree with you. When it comes to Trump, the only thing that counts to him is Trump. What Trump wants, Trump gets. Trump will do “anything” to win no matter what.
If it wasn’t for Moscow Mitch and the Republicans in the Senate enabling and protecting Trump, Dumbo Donald would not be getting away with what he has been allowed to get away with. He would have been found guilty in the Senate trial and booted out of the White House. He would also be in mired in courts across the country for the crimes he has committed.
One thing we can be thankful for is that Trump’s worst enemy is Trump. His corruption, ignorance, and racism are on display every day for everyone to see even his blind and obedient, hate-filled, racist, deplorable supporters cannot be that deaf, dumb and blind. They know who Trump is but they do not care because they are also like Trump.
The only way Trump can win the November election is by stealing it.
FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate of all the reputable polls shows Trump underwater by 15.8 percent.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/adults/
Scroll down to “How Trump compares to past presidents” starting with Truman in 1945, and Trump is the most unpopular president ever. Trump’s approval rating have never even reached 50%.
Real Clear Politics also averages all the polls and the gap on that site is 13.5% today.
The polls were accurate about the 2016 election. The polls were based on the popular vote and not the Electoral College. Hillary did win the popular vote by 2.7 million more votes than Trump ended up with. But Trump won the Electoral College by winning three states with less than 80k votes for all three states, and those states were targeted heavily by the Russian propaganda that focused on black voters with a goal to get them to not vote and it has been determined that 200,000 black voters stayed home because of the Russians planting doubts in their minds that they could not trust Hillary Clinton.
If Trumpty Dumpty loses the popular vote with a 14.5 percent gap in a voter turnout of 145 million, TrumpEekThinSkin could end up with only 58 million votes to Biden with 87 million. I have read a couple of times that there is no way that the Kremlin’s Agent Orange can win the Electoral College if he loses the popular vote by 15 million votes or more. If the popular vote polls are as accurate as they were in 2016, that gap could be 29 million votes this time instead of only 2.7 mllion.
“I will build a great, great, wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall,” The vow was one of the centerpieces of his successful presidential bid.
Did Mexico really pay for that wall? I must have missed some Fox News Flash.
……………………..
Trump visiting Arizona to mark milestone of 200 miles of border wall construction | Fox News
Fox News Flash top headlines for June 22
President Trump is heading to Arizona on Tuesday to spotlight his administration’s completion of the 200th mile of border wall construction along the nation’s southern boundary with Mexico.
The president is scheduled to tour the border wall, receive a briefing on construction efforts and take part in a roundtable discussion with local community and elected leaders on border security, all during a visit to Yuma on Tuesday.
BORDER WALL FIGHT ENSNARES ARIZONA PUBLIC LAND
Then-presidential candidate Trump repeatedly pledged during his 2016 campaign for president that “I will build a great, great, wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall,” to slow down the entry of illegal immigrants and drugs into the U.S. The vow was one of the centerpieces of his successful presidential bid…
https://fxn.ws/2V3Wh7W
From what I have read, about half of that 200 miles of Trumpty Dumpty’s Great
Wall that will help lead to his Great Fall from a Great Height, is reconstruction.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46824649
“On December 17, 2019, acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Mark Morgan stated that 93 miles of new wall has been built during the Trump administration; according to CBP figures, at least 90 miles of that replaced existing structures.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_wall
“None of us have ever been told to slow down on testing. … In fact, we will be doing more testing,” Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, told Congress on Tuesday.
President Trump told reporters earlier in the day that he was not kidding when asked if he had directed his administration to slow coronavirus testing. White House officials have insisted that he was speaking in jest during his rally in Tulsa on Saturday.
“I don’t kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear,” Trump told reporters.
Kentucky Closes 95 Percent of Polling Places, Leaving Louisville With Just One
BY
Amy Goodman & Juan González, Democracy Now!
PUBLISHED
June 23, 2020
Three states are holding primaries today: New York, Kentucky and Virginia. In Kentucky, voters could face very long lines as the state slashed the number of polling places from 3,700 to just 170 — a 95% reduction. In Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, only one polling place is open.
https://truthout.org/video/kentucky-closes-95-percent-of-polling-places-leaving-louisville-with-just-one/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Truthout+Share+Buttons