WHEN THEY'RE LAUGHING AT YOU, YOU'RE IN SERIOUS TROUBLE

Yesterday I said I was worried about the media's nonstop, days-long coverage of President Trump's rally in Tulsa. Today the reviews are in, and they're terrible. Here's the main New York Times story:

President Trump’s attempt to revive his re-election campaign sputtered badly on Saturday night as he traveled to Tulsa for his first mass rally in months and found a far smaller crowd than his aides had promised him, then delivered a disjointed speech that did not address the multiple crises facing the nation or scandals battering him in Washington.

The weakness of Mr. Trump’s drawing power and political skills, in a state that voted for him overwhelmingly and in a format that he favors, raised new questions about his electoral prospects for a second term at a time when his poll numbers were already falling....

While the president’s campaign had claimed that more than a million people had sought tickets for the rally, the 19,000-seat BOK Center was at least one-third empty during the rally. A second, outdoor venue was so sparsely attended that he and Vice President Mike Pence both canceled appearances there.

And then there were the kids.

President Trump’s campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday, but it failed to deliver. Hundreds of teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they’re at least partially responsible....

TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After @TeamTrump tweeted asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.

The trend quickly spread on TikTok, where videos with millions of views instructed viewers to do the same.... “Oh no, I signed up for a Trump rally, and I can’t go,” one woman joked, along with a fake cough, in a TikTok posted on June 15.

Was this really what lowered attendance? There's an alternate theory:

Poll this week found that 61% of strong Trump supporters view mask-wearing positively. I think those are the folks who stayed away. https://t.co/70UzbKjZNN

— Joshua Holland 🔥 (@JoshuaHol) June 21, 2020

That was a Fox News poll, by the way -- once again, Fox's polling unit was reporting results that don't jibe with the channel's (and Trump's) usual propaganda.

But if the press is reporting that the Trump campaign was humiliated by amateur online pranksters, that's a change. The coverage of Trump himself hasn't been very good lately, or at least not since he speculated that ingesting household cleaning products might be the secret to avoiding COVID-19. (I think that's when his freefall really began.) However, the press has continued to respect the Trump campaign, with its bottomless bank account and (many reporters still believe) hidden army of rural and suburban white voters who allegedly aren't being counted by pollsters but might overwhelm Joe Biden on Election Day. The campaign claims to have an unbeatable data-mining operation, and much of the media believes this -- but it now appears that this unstoppable digital machine had sand thrown in its gears by a bunch of fifteen-year-olds with iPhones.

And the poor Trumpers! They have two messages that seem contradictory: that the vast majority of America thinks the way they do and that Trump's rallies are the safe space where they get to talk and behave the way they want, free of interference from the hated media, the deep state, big-city liberals, antifa, Black Lives Matter, George Soros, Bill Gates ... you know the rest. The TikTok and K-pop teens appear to have invaded their sanctuary, and they're claiming that in-person activists invaded it as well, although that seems unlikely.

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, falsely blamed the small numbers on “radical protesters” and the news media who he said had frightened away supporters. But there were few protests in the area and no sizable effort to block entrances, and there was a strong security presence.

If the real America is overwhelmingly Trumpist, and Trump fans are much tougher than left-leaning protesters -- cops, bikers, and gun owners vs. snowflakes and soy boys -- then how could the Trumpers have been outfought?

The only enemy the campaign seems not to want to blame is the coronavirus -- which might be the real culprit. But it's an enemy Trump doesn't want to fight.

This is an embarrassing moment, and the headlines are terrible. CNN: "Sick Staff and Empty Seats: How Trump's Triumphant Return to the Campaign Trail Went from Bad to Worse." Wasington Post: "Trump Rallies in Red-State America — and Faces a Sea of Empty Blue Seats."

This moment seems like January 16, 1992, when Maureen Dowd, then a reporter for The New York Times, wrote a story that painted a huge L for "loser" on George H.W. Bush's forehead.

After roaming far and wide and enjoying many foreign adventures, President Bush came back to New Hampshire today. And like Ulysses and other famous travelers before him, he found the home front a mess.

Mr. Bush quickly surveyed the damage and did what any self-respecting politician would do: He begged. He boasted. He posed with -- and petted -- a cow. He tried to look on the bright side, or as he put it, to play the role of "Mrs. Rose Scenario" searching for "the rainbow out there." ...

Necessity being the mother of political invention, the President put aside his statesman's mien and presented himself as down-home, domestic George Bush, a candidate who understands the pain of a state that has plunged from prosperity to austerity since 1988.

"Message: I care," he told an audience at the Exeter Town Hall....

Mr. Bush scampered back to the Tex-prep persona that worked for him in 1988. He suddenly began talking about "bidness" and quoting country music lyrics at every stop.

"I would remind you of another country-western song by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: 'If you want to see a rainbow, you've got to stand a little rain,'" he told his audiences. At one point, the President seemed so giddy at resuming his fighting campaign demeanor that he called the band "the Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird."

The election might have been over at that moment.

The Trumpers will fight back, of course. Even before the rally, the right was claiming that Democrats were using the virus to hurt the president. Here's an American Spectator post from Friday:

Any remaining doubt that curbing President Trump’s campaign rallies was a key goal of the Democratic response to COVID-19 should be quelled by the Democrats’ antic opposition to Saturday’s Trump rally in Tulsa. They began with shrill fear-mongering, despite data showing that daily case rates have plateaued nationally and death rates are declining....

The point is to find some pretext to stop President Trump from communicating directly to the American people while his campaign team uses the rallies to register voters and continue to grow Trump’s support using its advantage in digital technology....

They know the Trump campaign’s competitive edge in digital technology gave it a significant advantage over the Biden operation while the pandemic interrupted the campaign. Moreover, they justifiably worry that this edge will become even more deadly if they are unable to prevent the president from launching a new series of rallies.

(Friday was the worst day for new cases in America in nearly two months. Virus transmission is not at a plateau anymore.)

The Trumpers might also try to use the TikTok story to go after -- don't laugh -- vote by mail. That idea is showing up in the comments for this Breitbart post.

Democrats [DemonRats] say... " Claims of election cheating with mail in ballots are a made up lie by the Trump Administration"

Then, they go and request tickets to a rally, that they never use, all to effect the outcome of this rally.

Oh sure, they can be trusted to NOT cheat in an election. These idiots just proved the point they cannot be trusted.

****

Democrats shooting themselves in the foot yet again. Proving without doubt that cheat-by-mail is real. Cheating is in their DNA.

And because TikTok is a Chinese company, the Breitbartniks think this was a Chinese government operation.

We had a whole Russian investigation into buying Facebook ads.

The coordination through Tiktok doesn't happen without Chinese government cooperation. With that said, ANYTHING that any China based company does has to pass through the government....

Nothing the Democrats say or do regarding this election can be trusted. Mail in voting, even polls are suspect and this proves it.

VoterID for ALL voting now.

But I thought Trump was the first president who intimidated the Chinese! That's what the Trumpers have been telling us for years, isn't it?

Teenagers, the Chinese, Black Lives Matter, and the DemonRAT Party all got the better of us in Tulsa! Therefore ... we're #1! Reelect Trump! Somehow, that's not an impressive message.