By Baxter
We're just going to savor this moment.
There's so much online coverage and commentary to soak up about Donald Bedford Forrest Trump's failed MAGA rally in Tulsa last night, we're thinking of making another pot of coffee and canceling our plans for the day. The fun has just begun! So far, our favorite headline is from the CBC: "Trump Rally Features Empty Seats, Staff With Coronavirus Infections." Sweet!
Trump is going to hate this, but our first thought when we saw the barren arena and the empty overflow area — where they canceled the outdoor speeches and struck the stage in broad daylight, not even waiting for the cover of darkness — was that hapless Romney event in 2012 at Detroit's Ford Field. The massive football stadium swallowed up the crowd.
Brad "Weird Beard" Parscale tried to blame "protestors" (we prefer the "er" spelling) for interfering at the arena entrances, but no such people existed. In truth, the campaign was frantically texting people with "There's still space!" In short, MAGA just didn't show up.
Yes, we know crowds don't measure the ultimate result on Election Day. George McGovern pulled tremendous crowds in the last week of the campaign in 1972, and you could cite dozens of other examples. But with a local stagehand union reporting a mere 6,611 in the house last night, it's very clear: epic fail. Fun fact: Kamala Harris had three times that number at her Presidential campaign kickoff in Oakland.
Benedict Donald, Weird Beard and Team Trump all got rolled. It looks like lots of people — mostly but not all teenagers on TikTok — registered tickets online and hoarded them. And Weird Beard was gleefully tweeting that they had nearly a million requests! Egg, meet face.
When you make the expected crowd your benchmark of success and then fail to meet it, that becomes the story. Somebody like Parscale should have known better. Did he fly back on Air Force One, or did he have enough sense to wait until today and fly commercial out of his own pocket? That couldn't have been a fun flight. We cats PURR.
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