The Patriot Post® · The Kerfuffle Over Trump's Tulsa Rally
President Donald Trump held his first campaign rally since the pandemic began, and roughly 6,200 people attended Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That’s the silver lining. The embarrassment for the president is that his reelection campaign set expectations far higher than a few thousand, touting more than a million ticket requests in the days leading up to the rally. So it’s little wonder that falling so far short was newsworthy, and it’s certainly not surprising that Leftmedia coverage was full of schadenfreude. Ever the showman, Trump loves to brag and bicker about his crowd sizes. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
The scuttlebutt is that leftists organized via social media to “claim” a large portion of those tickets, as well as show up to protest and obstruct entrance to the event. It’s possible that these efforts suppressed turnout, given that a “ticket” merely allowed folks to stand in line for hours to enter the 19,000-seat stadium. But a couple hundred protesters at a Trump rally isn’t anything new, and surely leftists didn’t snatch up so many tickets that only 6,200 people in bright red Tulsa were motivated to show up.
“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,” insisted Brad Parscale, the campaign manager who organized the rally and pushed the big numbers. “Registering for a rally means you’ve RSVP’d 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.”
The Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe, who is no fan of Trump, likewise argues it was “absolutely not” this leftist effort on social media but the coronavirus pandemic. “You could be Trump’s most emphatic supporter,” she says, “but an indoor rally with no social distancing, full of people refusing to wear masks is a recipe for contracting the coronavirus. It’s no wonder that turnout paled in comparison to his previous rallies.”
Regardless, the fact that Trump’s campaign so grossly overestimated the size of this rally should be reason for some soul-searching and perhaps a few staff changes.
On the other hand, at least Trump held a rally. Joe Biden’s still running his campaign from his basement, which is right where Democrats want him. Their strategy is to prolong the economic tribulation of the pandemic by blaring headlines about every uptick in COVID cases and deaths, all while fomenting racial division by somehow blaming Republicans for the death and mayhem in cities run by Democrats for decades. The more they make the election a referendum on Trump’s personality and supposed failures, and the less they make it about Biden, the better they think their chances are. In that respect, Trump may indeed be his own greatest opponent.