Trump Campaign Chief Goes After Media Coverage of Low Rally Turnout, Suggests They May Revoke Credentials

Photo via Lincoln Project on Twitter.

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign manager, Brad Parscale, threatened to block reporters from the president’s future rallies following coverage on the low turnout they saw in Tulsa on Saturday night.

In the days leading up to the president’s rally in Oklahoma, the Trump campaign bragged about the high levels of RSVPs they was seeing, which led to them setting up an “overflow” event that was supposed to happen before the official rally. That overflow rally ended up getting scrapped, and even when the Trump campaign beckoned people into the Bank of Oklahoma Center to fill the empty spaces, Trump’s speech ended up happening before a crowd well underneath the venue capacity.

Tulsa Fire Dept tells ABC News “just shy of 6,200” people attended President Trump’s rally on Saturday. This official count is from the Fire Marshall who was on scene at the event per safety requirements, @ScottWithersABC reports. The BOK Center holds 19,199 ppl at full capacity.

— Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) June 21, 2020

While the low turnout might be explained by continued public fears over the coronavirus pandemic, a number of reports have suggested that the Trump campaign might’ve been duped as to the level of interest there was for the rally. The New York Times reported that thousands of K-pop fans and TikTok users launched a covert online ploy to put in RSVP registrations for rally tickets, just to troll the campaign by not showing up.

On Sunday, Parscale released a statement blasting “leftists and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking they somehow impacted rally attendance.” He then turned on reporters who “behaved unprofessionally and were willing dupes to the charade,” and then insisted that the campaign has ways to weed out bogus RSVPs.

These phony ticket requests never factor into our thinking. What makes this lame attempt at hacking our events even more foolish is the fact that every rally is general admission – entry is on a first-come-first-served basis and prior registration is not required. 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.

Parscale concluded by saying “for the media to now celebrate the fear that they helped create is disgusting, but typical. And it makes us wonder why we bother credentialing media for events when they don’t do their full jobs as professionals.”