ROCK THE VOTE & U.S. VOTE FOUNDATION
TIKTOK played a significant role in the low attendance at drumpf's / trump's neo-nazi fascist campaign rally in Tulsa. drumpf / trump himself played a role too as more and more people disapprove of his performance as president. (NOT MY) pres drumpf / trump and (NOT MY) vice pres pence spewed their usual lies and promoted their hatered, bigotry, racism, misogyny, fascist authoritarianism and violence to the voluntarily ignorant in the arena ( a paltry 6000-6500 in a 19, 199 capacity venue ). DO NOT see the pathetic attendance as confirmation the drumpf / trump - pence administration is going to loose this election, Apathy and over confidence is how they were elected in 2016. Go to Rock the Vote or U.S. Vote Foundation to check your voter registration, to register to vote and to get details about voting in your state. From NPR.....
Trump Returns To Campaign Trail With A Familiar Message In A Changing World
Updated at 9:05 a.m. ET Sunday
In his first big campaign event since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, President Trump reached back into his culture war playbook to paint an image of a left-wing extremist dystopia that will take hold if he is defeated and Democratic opponent Joe Biden is elected this November.
"If the Democrats gain power, then the rioters will be in charge and no one will be safe and no one will have control," Trump said to a crowd, which numbered in the thousands but failed to fill an arena in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday night and was far smaller than Trump's campaign promised. "Joe Biden is not the leader of his party. Joe Biden is a helpless puppet of the radical left."
But then Trump seemed to undercut that message, saying of Biden, "He's not radical left" and that "he was never radical left. But now he's controlled by the radical left."
That highlights a problem that Trump and his campaign have recognized since before the Democratic primary. It would have been much easier to tie many of Biden's more progressive primary opponents to more extreme positions, because Biden has disavowed many of them. He has had to stand on debate stages and argue from the center-left when the energy, enthusiasm and loudest voices within the party were against him.
Amid Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests that have swept the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, the incumbent president's political standing has suffered. His campaign hoped the Tulsa event would provide a morale boost. It billed that a million people had signed up for tickets, and it built a second stage outside for an overflow crowd. The president and vice president were scheduled to give two speeches — one outside, one in. But the overflow crowd never materialized, and the outdoor festivities were called off.
About 120,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 on Trump's watch, and he is seen by voters as fanning the flames of racial tensions in the wake of Floyd's death.
On Saturday night, the president defended his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, claiming to have saved "millions."
"We saved millions of lives. Now it's time, get back to work," Trump said to a tightly packed crowd, most of whom were not wearing masks. Trump made the claim despite downplaying the threat posed by the coronavirus for months and despite evidence that cases are spiking in many parts of the country, such as Florida, Texas and, yes, Oklahoma.
At one point, Trump said he told his administration to "slow the testing down" for the coronavirus.
"When you do testing to that extent, you are gonna find more people, you're gonna find more cases," Trump said. "So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test, and they test. We have tests that people don't know what's going on."
A White House official said that Trump was joking and that the administration is "proud" of the level of testing it has done, according to a Wall Street Journal reporter. Yet Trump has repeatedly said he thinks high levels of testing make the U.S. look bad, because it shows more cases than if less testing were done.
Democrats have seized on the comment. The Biden campaign released a statement after the rally, saying that in "an outrageous moment that will be remembered long after tonight's debacle of a rally, President Trump just admitted that he's putting politics ahead of the safety and economic well-being of the American people."
Biden also tweeted, "Speed up the testing," about an hour after the rally ended.
By Sunday morning, a Democratic group had already cut an ad seizing on the moment.
Trump, who at one point meandered into a long defense — and reenactment — of his gingerly walking down a ramp and drinking water during a speech at the West Point military academy, again played on racist stereotypes and nicknames. He labeled the coronavirus the "Chinese virus" to approving laughs from the crowd, even adding in the phrase "kung flu."
He created a fictional story about life under the left, referencing when a "tough hombre" tried to break into a house, and a woman in it, whose husband was away for work, tried to call 911 but the number was no longer working.
Trump defended Confederate statues, saying the left is trying to "desecrate our monuments."
He pushed Congress to pass a law punishing people with a year in jail for burning the American flag, though the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right to burn the flag under the First Amendment decades ago.
He took aim at the NFL, which apologized recently for how it treated black athletes who kneeled during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Trump implored, "Never kneel — we will stand proud and stand tall."
He hit several culture war notes, arguing that conservative culture was under attack from the likes of Biden and making a range of false claims about late-term abortion, taking away guns and wanting to "prosecute Americans for going to church but not burning a church."
Trump said Democrats want to abolish bail and ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. They want to dismantle police, he said, while freeing vicious MS-13 gang members, and he said that they want "rioters" and "looters" to "have more rights than law-abiding citizens."
"The silent majority is stronger than ever before," Trump said, declaring the Republican Party "the party of Lincoln" and "law and order."
But whether that message will work again in 2020 is very much an open question. Polls have shown shifts on how Americans view protesters and the police — and Trump has done little since becoming president to reach out to independents, a group he won in 2016.
His campaign was hoping that Saturday night's event, which went against the guidance of health officials, would signal the enthusiasm that the president still retains — and be a shot in the arm.
But the event did not live up to its high billing. Thousands gathered inside the arena, filling the lower portion of it, with many scattered in the upper section, but it wasn't full. Not long before the event, the campaign announced that the events outside were called off.
The campaign blamed it on protesters.
"President Trump is rallying in Tulsa with thousands of energetic supporters, a stark contrast to the sleepy campaign being run by Joe Biden from his basement in Delaware," campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in a statement. "Sadly, protestors interfered with supporters, even blocking access to the metal detectors, which prevented people from entering the rally. Radical protestors, coupled with a relentless onslaught from the media, attempted to frighten off the President's supporters. We are proud of the thousands who stuck it out."
There were certainly protesters, but those on scene reported largely peaceful protests.
Our @CBSNews team stood at the W Fourth St security barricade for over an hour and watched as state police & national guardsmen blocked it. Trump supporters expressed disappointment when the entrance closed, but none of them appeared shaken or intimidated by peaceful protesters. twitter.com/parscale/statu…
It's not a good sign for a president who needed a shot in the arm as he faces slumping poll numbers. There are still four and a half months to go until Election Day, and a lot will change, but it's hard to imagine that this is what his campaign was hoping for.
Trump and his campaign know that he is at a low point, and it's clearly gnawing at Trump that it was spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, which derailed the economy.
He was "riding high," Trump said, but that was "before this thing [the coronavirus] came in."
TikTok Prank May Account For Trump Rally's Low Attendance Rate
The Trump campaign said more than 1 million people expressed interest online to attend the rally in Tulsa, Okla., but only about 6,000 people showed up. A prank apparently fueled phony registrations.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump's campaign had high hopes for its rally in Tulsa, Okla., over the weekend. Ahead of the event, the president's campaign manager said more than a million people had expressed interest online. But the Tulsa Fire Department estimated that far fewer people showed up - about 6,000. As NPR's Bobby Allyn reports, an effort to prank the campaign organized on the social media app TikTok may have played a role.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: At a high school in Iowa, Mary Jo Laupp directs musical theater production. And she's not a fan of President Trump. When she heard about Trump planning a campaign launch event in Tulsa, Okla., she hatched a plan.
MARY JO LAUPP: I have a friend who's been known to do the whole register for two tickets for the other guy's rally and not go, her own little mini rebellion. Nobody ever knows she does it, but she feels good.
ALLYN: And Laupp thought she would feel good if she did the same thing. She jumped on TikTok, the favorite app of the kids at her high school, and issued a call to action.
(SOUNDBITE OF TIKTOK VIDEO)
LAUPP: I recommend that all of those of us that want to see this 19,000-seat auditorium barely filled or completely empty, go reserve tickets now and leave him standing there alone on the stage. What do you say?
ALLYN: And it caught on. Prominent TikTokkers (ph) shared it. Fans of Korean pop with large Twitter followings boosted it. A day after making the video, 300,000 people had said they were interested in the event. The Trump campaign would go on to say that more than a million people had requested tickets.
Steve Schmidt is a political strategist in Park City, Utah, who has worked on Republican presidential campaigns but strongly opposes President Trump. Schmidt was talking to his 16-year-old daughter who told him, yeah, even I got a ticket to Trump's rally as a joke.
STEVE SCHMIDT: She goes, well, all the kids do - you know, everybody. Like, there's hundreds of kids who have probably thousands of tickets just in Park City - says it's all over TikTok.
ALLYN: At the Bank of Oklahoma Center on Saturday, Trump canceled plans to address an outdoor overflow section because there was almost no one there. Inside the arena, a crowd of people was surrounded by sparsely filled upper rafters. Tulsa city officials say the crowd was about 6,200 people. The Trump campaign told NPR that fears over the coronavirus and protesters is what really depressed turnout. The campaign says it didn't cap registration, and it was first come, first serve, saying the phony TikTok-fueled sign-ups was not a factor in their planning.
And it is true that online enthusiasm doesn't always translate into a large rally crowd, says Tim Fullerton. He's a former Obama presidential campaign staffer.
TIM FULLERTON: You know, you always get more RSVPs for an event than end up showing up. It's just the nature. It's called the flake rate.
ALLYN: The flake rate, a global pandemic, a massive online prank - a lot could have shrunk attendance. But Schmidt, the political strategist, says there is no doubt TikTokkers duped the Trump campaign.
SCHMIDT: It was really an act of civil disobedience, of subversion by young people who understand the consequences and are appalled and disgusted by the comportment and behavior of this president.
ALLYN: Back in Iowa, Laupp, who is 51, has become known as TikTok Grandma. She argues that it's not important to ever know for sure the extent of the online prank's impact.
LAUPP: Whatever the real reasons were, we'll probably never all know. It's probably somewhere in the middle of all of this, that it was a little bit of everything that played in. But I do know that there are 15-, 16-, 17- on up to 24-, 25-year-old kids that are saying, we did this.
ALLYN: Laupp says that feeling will lead to more online activism by young people, including around get-out-the-vote efforts - at least for those old enough to vote.
Bobby Allyn, NPR News, San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOJA CAT'S "SAY SO")
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