"Really YUGE" crowd at Trump rally in Tulsa on Sat 6/20/2020!
Trump got played by a bunch of teenagers on TikTok. They signed up for hundreds of thousands of tickets they never intended to use.
Trump said on Monday: "We expect to have, you know, it's like a record-setting crowd. We've never had an empty seat. And we certainly won't in Oklahoma."
He claimed 3 days in advance that there were "lines of people right now trying to get into the arena", camping out so they could get the best seats. He considered also renting out the 40,000 seat convention hall next to the arena. He paid a fortune to have them build a special temporary outdoor stage, so he could speak to the crowd of "over a million" attendees that would vastly overflow the 19,000 arena seats. See the video of Trump and Fox News folks making these claims. That stage was quickly removed when almost no one showed up.
The Tulsa fire marshall says there were less than 6,200 scanned tickets. Even the Trump campaign only claims 12,000, counting an additional 6,000 in campaign staff, press and special guests. The arena was 1/3 to 2/3rds full, and no overflow.
So he abandoned social distancing and packed them all together in the lower tier, most without masks. Just to make it look crowded in the carefully framed photos and videos. But someone still got this shot of the empty upper tier. A single red fan in a sea of empty blue seats.
I wonder how many Trump fans will die of Coronavirus for attending this rally? And how many of their friends, family, neighbors, etc.
All to stroke Trump's fragile ego. Sad...