{"id":86818,"date":"2020-06-22T06:50:54","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T11:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/?p=86818"},"modified":"2020-06-22T06:50:54","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T11:50:54","slug":"auto-draft-48","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2020\/06\/22\/auto-draft-48\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Campaign Brushes Off Low Turnout at President’s Rally"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s campaign on Sunday brushed off the underwhelming size of the crowd at his first political rally in three months, blaming \u201cfake news media\u201d reports of the threat of coronavirus infections and the possibility of protests for keeping people away.<\/p>\n

The 19,000-seat BOK Center arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, appeared to be a bit more than half full Saturday night, even though the president\u2019s campaign last week boasted that a million people had registered to attend. The Trump campaign said about 12,000 people passed through metal detectors at the entrances.<\/p>\n

An outdoor rally for an overflow crowd was called off because few were there, while the arena\u2019s upper gallery was largely empty.<\/p>\n

For the cheering supporters who did show up, Trump gave them what they came to hear: nearly two hours of political taunts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

He railed against his Democratic opponent in the November national election, former Vice President Joe Biden, attacked \u201cradical left\u201d protesters demonstrating in recent weeks against police abuses in the U.S., and blamed China for the spread of what he called the \u201ckung flu,\u201d his derisive term for the coronavirus pandemic that has killed nearly 120,000 people in the U.S. and infected more than 2.2 million.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump called his sign-waving supporters \u201cwarriors\u201d and declared that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before.” He boasted about his conservative judicial appointees, low taxes, the booming stock market, the wall under construction on the southern border with Mexico to keep out undocumented immigrants and adding to the U.S. military budget.<\/p>\n

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\"FILE<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
FILE – Brad Parscale, campaign manager for President Donald Trump, speaks to supporters during a panel discussion, in San Antonio, Texas Oct. 15, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale on Sunday said the crowd size was kept down by several factors.<\/p>\n

\u201cA week\u2019s worth of the fake news media warning people away from the rally because of COVID and protesters, coupled with recent images of American cities on fire, had a real impact on people bringing their families and children to the rally,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued warnings that large gatherings such as Trump\u2019s rally are possible breeding grounds for the spread of the coronavirus. The Trump campaign checked the temperatures of rally-goers and handed out face masks to everyone, although it did not require anyone to wear one.<\/p>\n

As news cameras scanned the crowd, only a small portion of those watching the rally appeared to be wearing a mask.<\/p>\n

Trump is scheduled to travel Tuesday to the southwestern state of Arizona, where his agenda includes speaking to students in Phoenix, a city that began requiring wearing masks in public on Saturday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Regarding Saturday\u2019s rally,\u00a0Parscale\u00a0said protesters \u201ceven blocked entrances to the rally at times,\u201d although media reporters on the scene said they saw few protesters and that people who wanted to attend the rally appeared to walk in unimpeded.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Demonstrators<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
Demonstrators march near the BOK Center where President Donald Trump held a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 20, 2020.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Parscale dismissed reports that TikTok and K-Pop fans had flummoxed the Trump campaign by registering for tickets to the rally, to make it appear there would be a huge crowd, with no intention of attending.<\/p>\n

The campaign manager said, \u201cWe constantly weed out bogus numbers, as we did with tens of thousands at the Tulsa rally, in calculating our possible attendee pool. These phony ticket requests never factor into our thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cFor the media to now celebrate the fear that they helped create is disgusting, but typical. And it makes us wonder why we bother credentialing media for events when they don\u2019t do their full jobs as professionals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp told \u201cFox News Sunday\u201d that despite the Tulsa crowd size, 5.3 million people watched on Trump campaign digital channels, giving the rally a much broader reach than might have appeared from the telecast of the event.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s campaign scoffed at the size of the Tulsa crowd, saying, “Donald Trump has abdicated leadership and it is no surprise that his supporters have responded by abandoning him.”<\/p>\n

National polls show Biden pulling out to an average lead of 9.5 percentage points over Trump less than five months before the election, according to a compilation of polls by Real Clear Politics. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Biden has shunned any political rallies, giving television interviews from his home in the eastern state of Delaware and making a few appearances in nearby Philadelphia for speeches before small gatherings. He has not held a news conference in nearly three months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s campaign on Sunday brushed off the underwhelming size of the crowd at his first political rally in three months, blaming \u201cfake news media\u201d reports of the threat of coronavirus infections and the possibility of protests for keeping people away. The 19,000-seat BOK Center arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":86819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latests"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}