On June 20th, 2020 then-President Trump was worried about his reelection prospects. Lagging in the polls behind Democratic presidential nominee and then-former Vice President Joe Biden, and his signature MAGA rallies on hold for months due to the nationwide COVID-19 pandemic, Trump was dying to get back on the campaign trail. For whatever reason Trump and his campaign chose Tulsa – maybe due to the relative lack of local COVID-19 restrictions, that a deep Red State would guarantee a large crowd as opposed to a swing state, deliberate trolling because it was the site of one of the deadliest racial pogroms in American history 99 years earlier that month, or some combination thereof – and set it for June 19th, later pushing it back a day as to (pretend to) respect Juneteenth.
The Trump campaign and their fanboys were elated that he was hitting the road again. Better yet, they got over a million requests for tickets, so much so they made plans for a double indoor-outdoor rally at the Bank of Oklahoma arena in Tulsa. The MAGA trolls were SO freaking excited.
Then the big night came and…
Update: outdoor area has completely emptied out. pic.twitter.com/XS8M0IJRFc
— Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) June 20, 2020
Paging Sean Spicer for a crowd estimate in Tulsa
— Dan Rather (@DanRather) June 20, 2020
This is President Trump’s Fyre Fest. pic.twitter.com/USYQ6e94gM
— David Cicilline (@davidcicilline) June 20, 2020
The next day, the excuses…
Then the TikTok plot was revealed…
So that was a lot of fun, and without a doubt the most hilarious fuckups of the Trump reelection campaign up until that point at least. It began Trump’s quest for revenge against TikTok for their users’ trolling (TikTok had already had a legitimate bullseye on their back from the US Treasury department at that point), and to our knowledge Trump never attempted to have a rally anywhere close to that size until his 2024 campaign. It took a few months for him to really get back on the campaign trail, but most events were held at airports, with crowd sizes in the low thousands.
Much as we don’t really like citing Wikipedia, their article on the Tulsa Rally provides probably the most succinct description of what was accomplished for the Trump 2020 Campaign: “The number of daily COVID-19 cases in Oklahoma tripled in the 30 days that followed the rally, while Republican politician Herman Cain died from complications of COVID-19 after attending it.”
This piece originally appeared on June 20, 2021. This reprint contains some very minor edits and at least a few of the Disqus Hill comments are dead links due to those losers either getting booted from the platform or deleting the accounts of their own volition since 2021. Obviously also Trump has changed his tune on TikTok since those K-Pop kids fucked up Tulsa for him.
ILLEGAL 👽 • 4 years ago
HAHAHA IF THE DEMORATS CAN BURN THEIR CITIES DOWN DONALD TRUMP CAN HAVE A RALLY
Sat, 6/13/2020 1:47 AM on ‘Trump campaign manager says 300,000 tickets registered for upcoming rally’