Did a Prank from Teens Lead to Disappointing Turnout at Trump’s Tulsa Rally?

President Donald Trump has been hyping up his first rally in months as a grand return that was going to be involve huge sellout crowds.

It didn’t happen. The BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, appeared to be largely empty on Saturday despite the campaign saying there had been more than a million requests for tickets. There might be an explanation for where those tickets went.

According to a report in the New York Times, teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans are saying that they took advantage of the free registration for tickets, sending them across multiple fanbases and trying to get millions to register for the rally and not show up.

The Times reported that videos across TikTok and other social media outlets circulated, picking up millions of views, asking people to register for Trump’s rally and then not go. The report said that many of the videos were deleted shortly after being posted to hide the plans of boosting the attendance numbers before the event.

Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who has worked for President George W. Bush and Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, said that his daughter and her friends purchased “hundreds of tickets” for the event.

Leading up to the event, Trump and his campaign had been saying this event was going to draw tons of supporters. They planned for an overflow speech outdoors, which was eventually canceled when the numbers weren’t there.

The BOK Center, which has seating for 19,200, wound up having just 6,200 people inside its doors on Saturday, Andrew Little, the public information officer for the Tulsa Fire Department, said according to a report from Forbes.

Brad Pascale, Trump’s chairman for the re-election campaign, has been active on Twitter explaining reasons for the low attendance, saying that the media scared families away with threats of violent protesters and that protesters there blocked fans from getting inside, the latter being a claim Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump  campaign, agreed with according to the Times’ report.

The Times reported that reporters at the scene said there were few protests at the rally.

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