Did K-Pop Fans & TikTok Users Just Sabotage Trump's Tulsa Rally With Thousands of Reserved Tickets?

“Radical protesters, fuelled by a week of apocalyptic media coverage” prevented Donald Trump adherents from entering his campaign rally in Oklahoma Center in Tulsa on Saturday, the president’s campaign manager Brad Parscale announced on Twitter. Only several thousand people attended the event despite a claimed record number of tickets sold: nearly a million. Many now believe that young TikTok users and K-pop fans should be blamed for this discrepancy between RSVPs and actual attendance.

According to political strategist Steve Schmidt, who has worked on a number of Republican campaigns, including the one for George W. Bush, myriads of teens across America reserved tickets for the rally with no actual plans of attending the event.

“This is what happened tonight. I’m dead serious when I say this. The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump”, Schmidt wrote on Twitter, tagging along the account of Lincoln Project, a campaign dedicated to preventing the reelection of Donald Trump.  

Schmidt said that his 16-year-old daughter and her friends were among those who took part in the stunt, while re-posting Parscale’s tweet from 14 June claiming that about 800,000 tickets have already been sold for the Saturday event.

US Representative for New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also later wrote on Twitter that it was TikTok teens who “flooded the Trump campaign” with fake ticket reservations and “tricked” the campaign into believing that the event would be attended by a million of people.

“KPop allies, we see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice too,” Ocasio-Cortez argued.

A number of videos, photos and posts featuring young TikTok users dancing in front of screenshots for registration for Trump’s rally flooded social media platforms over the last couple of days. They are believed to have joined forces with K-pop fans to sign up for the event, even creating fake email addresses and phone numbers from time to time to reserve as many tickets as possible. However, they did not have the slightest desire to actually use them.  

Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa saw only a couple thousand attendees, despite organisers’ concerns that the president’s supporters would not be able to fit in the 19,000-seat BOK Center. They even built an outside stage for the president’s address to accommodate an unprecedented turnout, which apparently went unused.

The Saturday event, which had been postponed one day so as not to coincide with Juneteenth holiday, has been criticised by many of Trump’s Democratic opponents, including former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who slammed the president for gathering large crowds of people in the middle of a global pandemic.