US President Donald Trump kicked off his election campaign from Tulsa on Saturday. Thousands of his supporters were expected to attend the first campaign rally being held in the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic. But the crowd that showed up was significantly smaller than expected. Tik-tokers and K-pop fans have now claimed that they were behind the scant crowd in Tulsa.
They bought tickets in hundreds, with no intention to actually attend it. So, while Trump's campaign estimated a huge turnaround, it was nowhere close to what was expected.
Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and an outspoken critic of Trump, tweeted that Trump's campaign had been "rolled by American teens". Her 16-year-old daughter and her friends had hundreds of tickets but did not attend the event. In another tweet, he explained how the teens of America "struck a savage blow" against Trump. All across the country, they bought tickets for the event and the "fools on the campaign bragged about a million tickets", he tweeted.
A 60-year-old user commented it's not just teens but others also did the same thing. She said she had bought 300 tickets. Another user tweeted that her 15-year-old and her friends "purchased an obscene amount of tickets." She knew that teens were smarter than Trump", but "had no idea they could outwit his campaign staff", the user tweeted. There were several similar comments under Schmidt's tweet.
Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale blamed "the radical, protestors, fueled by a week of apocalyptic media coverage", for the low turnout. He accused them of blocking the metal detectors, preventing people from entering the arena.
US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Trump "just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok", who flooded the campaign with fake ticket reservations and tricked the campaign into believing that a million people wanted to hear Trump. She said she was proud of the Zoomers, which is a nickname for those of Generation Z.
This month, K-pop fans flooded the right-wing hashtags such as MAGA and Blue Lives Matter, with posts and videos of Korean pop, DailyMail reported. As a result, the trends meant for conservative and often racist commentary were replaced with those of K-pop.
