Things didn’t quite go as President Donald Trump had planned in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday for his first campaign rally since March. Days earlier, Trump had said “we’re either close to or over 1 million people wanting to go” to the rally. “Nobody has heard of numbers like this,” he boasted. “We expect to have a record-setting crowd. We’ve never had an empty seat, and we certainly won’t in Oklahoma.” When Saturday night rolled around, though, there were plenty of empty seats at the 19,000-capacity arena in Tulsa. [Update, June 21, 2020, at 10 a.m.: Even saying “half-empty” may be an exaggeration. Andrew Little, the public information officer for the Tulsa Fire Department, told Forbes that attendance at the rally was just under 6,200 people. Update, June 21, 2020, at 1:30 p.m.: A Trump campaign official said 12,000 people entered the arena.]
Trump’s campaign had expected such a huge crowd that the president planned to give a speech to an overflow group of supporters outside of the rally. But the outdoor portion ended up being canceled as there were barely any people there. A “campaign source” told CNN that they were afraid of angering Trump because of the thin crowds. In canceling the outside speech, the campaign blamed protesters, saying they “interfered with supporters” and blocked “access to metal detectors, which prevented people from entering the rally.” Reporters on the ground, though, noted that there weren’t really a lot of protesters in Tulsa on Saturday. Continue reading.