Posted on 06/23/2020 8:47:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
First, a note of caution: This story isn't just a CNN report. Jim Acosta, who is a resistance showboat, shares the byline. So beware. That said, specific details aside, multiple sources and several reports across various news outlets are all pointing in the same direction -- that the president and his team are angry about what happened in Tulsa (I outlined my explanatory factors behind the debacle yesterday), and finger-pointing is well underway. Based on this, Jared and Ivanka have their claws out for Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale:
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are "pissed" at campaign manager Brad Parscale over his predictions of a much larger crowd than the one that turned out at the Tulsa rally Saturday night, according to a Trump campaign source. "Jared and Ivanka are pissed at Brad over promising on crowd size," the source said. A spokesperson for Kushner later Sunday said it's "false" that they are upset with Parscale. And Parscale declined to comment for this story...A separate campaign source said Trump also "has every right to be pissed" over the turnout in Tulsa. "They gave adversaries and media a gift. It was overconfidence," the source said of Parscale and other campaign staffers close to the planning of the event...
Donors and friends of the President also have been fuming Sunday in the wake of Trump's poorly-attended rally, a person involved with the reelection effort told CNN. The person said blame from this camp has focused squarely on Parscale, of whom some had already been skeptical. But some donors and allies feel the rally debacle — in which the campaign made a decision to inflate expectations about enthusiasm for the rally rather than manage them at a reasonable level — threw into sharp relief the existing management problems on the campaign, the person said. "What happened last night is representative of a much bigger problem," the person noted.
The White House Press Secretary insists the president was energized and not angry, but does anyone actually believe that? His campaign team -- with whom he was reportedly already furious over bad polling numbers, which...aren't really their fault -- loudly told everyone who would listen that more than one million people had RSVP'd for the big event. And then 6,200 actually showed up. For a guy who's famously really, really into crowd sizes, it's hard to imagine Trump just taking that glaring failure in stride. This deep dive from Politico paints a stark picture, starting with detailing how Team Trump reached the reasonable but false conclusion that the bare minimum turnout would be 60,000, which was off by a factor of ten. Then things spiraled from there:
When they woke up Saturday morning, Trump advisers realized things were going downhill. Protesters were convening outside the arena. News emerged that a half-dozen advance staffers had tested positive for coronavirus, a revelation that angered the president ahead of his departure for Oklahoma and further amplified fears that the event could spread the disease. Hours before the rally was to get underway, it became clear to the president’s lieutenants that a debacle was underway and that there would be a patchwork of empty seats. Making matters worse for the campaign was its initial declaration that 1 million people had signed up to see Trump, a boast that was now destined to fall on its face.
The New York Times picks up the thread:
President Trump and several staff members stood backstage and gazed at the empty Bank of Oklahoma Center in horror. Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence had canceled plans at the last minute to speak at an outdoor overflow rally that was almost entirely empty, despite claims of nearly one million people registering for tickets to attend the event in Tulsa, Okla., and the president’s false boast of never having an empty seat at one of his events. The president, who had been warned aboard Air Force One that the crowds at the arena were smaller than expected, was stunned, and he yelled at aides backstage while looking at the endless rows of empty blue seats in the upper bowl of the stadium, according to four people familiar with what took place. Brad Parscale, the campaign manager who had put the event together, was not present.
Parscale is now apparently on the hot seat, with the campaign considering a move away from Trump's trademark mega-rallies, with persistent rumors of a potential campaign "shakeup" swirling. It looks like Parscale and his allies are nudging the press toward a different scapegoat, but who knows if that deflection will be effective. Ahem:
Poor attendance at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday night has President Trump increasingly frustrated with his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and considering shaking up his reelection team, according to sources familiar with the issue. “The president has diminishing confidence in Brad,” a former adviser said of Parscale, who served as the campaign’s digital director in 2016...According to the former adviser, Trump, who is “getting madder by the day,” has recently made dismissive comments about Parscale’s experience.
The president has taken to using a dismissive nickname to describe Parscale, which isn't a great sign. Writing at HotAir, Allahpundit ponders whether the crowd fiasco helped detract attention from Trump's own erratic performance, which whiffed on some focused attack lines while giving critics a major opening by joking about coronavirus testing:
Peter Spiliakos writes, “Trump could have spent fifteen minutes explaining how a Democratic governor killed thousands of elderly people as the news media cheered. But he doesn’t care about that. So he spent that time on his West Point speech.” Trump fans should be furious that he was so unfocused for a rally which he had weeks to prepare for and which was destined to be covered even more heavily by the media than his rallies usually are. The speech should have been 90 percent attacks on Democrats, starting with Biden but extending to Cuomo, Pelosi, left-wing vandals who are tearing down statues, and so on. He was so disjointed that he ended up babbling about prison time for flag-burners at one point. He’s always treated his rallies as one part photo op and one part therapy session but Republicans have every right to demand something more focused at this stage of the game.
I realize that many Trump fans don't want to hear negative news, and refuse to believe the polls, but Republican officials are sounding the alarm -- and the president is responding with private tirades and chaotic, ineffective messaging. What's the strategy here? This quote from the Times story excerpted above suggests serious angst within the party:
“Outside advisers to the president said his team was fielding calls from nervous donors and Republican lawmakers, who were asking whether the poorly attended rally indicated problems that were too big too fix with just over four months until Election Day.” https://t.co/3KSSA5P8qi— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) June 21, 2020
On the brighter side for Team Trump, I'll leave you with this. Heavy interest in the event was not a mirage:
Setting aside the crowd size fiasco, a record-setting *7.7 million* Americans watched Saturday’s Tulsa Trump rally live on @FoxNews https://t.co/swGKVq4tBa— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 22, 2020
I hate weasel words.
The door counter had 12,000+ while the “estimate” by the Fire Marshal had the number at 6,000.
“Unnamed sources” is another pet peeve. We know the Trump administration is riddled with traitors. Take anything second hand with a huge grain of salt.
I went to the Trump Rally in Rio Rancho. It was full with an overflow crowd outside. At about 8:00pm there was a weather service severe thunderstorm alert. Many of the attendees had driven hours to attend and had stood outside in the New Mexico heat all day. Probably about 10% of the attendees left early to get ahead of the incoming storm. I saw presstitudes go running into the stands to take photos of empty seats. I said at the time that they are going to claim it was poorly attended. I was right.
The narrative has been set...Trump can’t fill up venues.
Come on! Anybody that believed that 1M ticket thing was stupid and delusional. He had what about 6000-8000 people in the arena? that’s more than Gropin’ Joe has had show up for any of his events since he signed up as a candidate. It’s probably more than he gets on-line during his time events.
Reportedly Trump’s rally had a million+ on-line followers.
Thank God the famous “conservative” Guy Benson had the sense to add the last MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCE to this drivel, which I did not read, because I’m tired of the Guy Bensons using big words to say nothing.
Do you feel that YOU have learned anything from this, Buckeye?
If President Trump EVER puts Rove on his team...I will not vote at all.
NONSENSE!!!
Total BULLSHIRT!
The rally was a YUGE success! (in person and ONLINE/TV)
Don’t be fooled by this CRAP!
The only thing they should be mad about is the stealing of tickets by the left.
Totally sabotaged. I’ve seen lots of videos and comments from people that were there with every intention of getting in but were blocked from entry by blm protesters. In an effort to quell any potential violence the police closed all but one entrance. Disgraceful!
The Tulsa mayor, a RINO, didn’t help. He did an executive order on a curfew, which he cancelled the next day after people had to move, said he would not be at the rally, temp takers told to leave so people outside were turned away. There is another thing: many reliable resources say there was actually 10,000 to 12000. I also believed the protestors could have been blocked further away.
Trump needs to stick to the speech and stop the long stories. The Boeing one was painfully long and unnecessary. A 2 hour speech is an hour too long. His message got lost with the focus on drinking water and walking down ramps.
He should be challenging Biden, put him on the defensive. Biden is in his basement getting a free pass. Why come out when no one is demanding it?
Five Quick Things: The Facts of Life Are Conservative, Even After Tulsa
1. The sabotaging of Trump’s rally also destroys the argument for mail-in balloting.
By now we don’t have to get too far into this. The president’s campaign is taking it on the chin since Saturday over the fact they touted some million people who had entered Eventbrite ticket requests for his rally in Tulsa, but something on the order of 7,000 people actually showed up.
This has been described as a disaster, though it’s not exactly clear why. Other than a few leftist protests here and there, including one promoting black trans people in Brooklyn, drawing 7,000 people to a political event in this COVID-19 era is a monumental feat. Certainly one that couldn’t be duplicated by Joe Biden, who refuses to leave his basement for anything associated with a public speaking engagement — largely, assuredly, for fear that a scant few people would actually show up.
But Trump’s rally was designated a major disappointment and a disaster, despite the fact it drew nearly eight million television viewers on broadcast and cable TV and another four million on streaming platforms, making it the gold standard for 2020 presidential election speeches and quite possibly the single most important political event of the first six months of 2020.
Nevertheless, the media narrative is a failure because of the million Eventbrite signups, some 300,000 came from Democrats aiming to sabotage the event. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed credit for “teens on Tik Tok” signing up fraudulently for Trump Tulsa tickets, while other Democrat activists bragged about the number of Eventbrite signups they were able to spam their way into soaking up.
Nobody on the Left, in their triumphal reveals, bothered to pay attention to the fact that what they’d done in taking credit for sandbagging Trump’s event was to bolster the argument against their No. 1 procedural issue of the 2020 election cycle — namely, the promotion of mail-in balloting.
To hear the Democrats talk about it, mail-in balloting is the most important solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, because it’s too dangerous for people to be together at a polling location. That is, of course, ridiculous — there have been lots of election dates across the country that have necessitated in-person balloting, and scant evidence those have led to incidences of the Wuhan virus spreading out of control.
The argument against wholesale mail-in balloting is simple and obvious; namely, it’s a bad idea to put big-city post offices in charge of ballot security when there are so many dishonest and corrupt partisan slimeballs out there who would tamper with elections.
Half the Democrat Party scoffed at that contention, while the other half proved its validity by tampering with Trump’s rally numbers in order to create the narrative that the most-watched political event of the 2020 cycle so far was a fizzle.
Sorry, folks. That’s an unmitigated #FAIL. Do better next time.
There where thousands out side that couldn’t get in. They where still being screened while the event started
No, if you watched it, you would know that it had way more than 12,000 in the arena.
I watched some right side broadcasting during the say, and there were more than 30,000 people out side in line by 1:00 PM.
The people were directed away and scared away and turned away.
I don't believe that the President is pissed at Brad Parscale.
He was not working at the gates.
Benson should know better.
It’s a hit piece. The objective here is to run Pascale out of the campaign by sowing discourse between him and Ivanka and Jared.
Pascale is a genius. If Trump falls for this, it’s because Ivanka and Jared fell for this prank.
I’m sure they had tens of thousands of tickets. You just don’t give out tickets you have to send them to a cell phone or an email.
Again, does not add up.
The only named source denies the animosity. I’ll wait, thx.
Who are you to tell the President how to do what got him elected?
If you get bored after an hour, go to bed and what is a FagZan?
BS
That rally turned out amazing for the challenges it had.
they say some 11 million watched online and TV but, I watched with 3 others on my phone and we spent two hours laughing.
I was going to call for donations and entry into free trip and photo op with the president but, decided I just wasn’t into the BS and watched for 2 hours laughing my azz off
At 1:30 we biked downtown and saw people had already gotten in and neither entrance had a line. I then planned to get back by 4:00 and figured I could get right in. My wife didn’t want to risk China flu with a new grandchild due soon. Then I had an odd bike spill and didn’t go after all.
As far as I know, this was the largest stadium event in the entire country since March. THAT ALONE is a positive story.
I wonder how the capacity of the BOK Center compares with other rallies. When Trump spoke at the Mabee Center Jan 20, 2016 capacity was about 8,000, I think. I had to wait in the cold over an hour, making me think this one would be a much longer wait.
I love Trump! I’ve seen better speeches though.
Who likes a 2HOUR speech? No one! The crowd was sitting on its hands through the long stories—not a good image. When the 1 1/2 hr. mark came I was pleading for him to end it. Plus, I don’t recall the crowd chanting “4 more years”, which says s lot. The best part was the last 10 minutes, but by then the crowd was too tired to really get going. The only thing I remember about this speech is the slippery ramp and him bringing up Parkinson’s! A gift to Joe in his basement.
I agree. It was kind of a flop and not just for the empty seats. Trump basically says the same things at every rally, and the sidetrack about saluting and the slippery ramp was just goofy. Ed Rollins said as much on Lou Dobbs’ show. He said the Trump campaign is floundering somewhat, and he was critical of Parscale.
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