President Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said the reelection campaign made an embarrassing mistake by touting how big of a crowd it expected at the president’s first rally since the coronavirus pandemic shut down large, in-person events.
“I think a fundamental mistake was made. Overpromising and underdelivering is the biggest mistake you can make in politics,” Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager from 2015 until mid-2016, said in an interview with radio show New Hampshire Today with Jack Heath.
“We never did something like this,” he said, referring to the 2016 campaign. “And what that means is we have to go back and reevaluate the system in which people were getting those tickets and determining if they were real, if they were robots, and putting additional protocols in place so this doesn’t happen again.”
Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted last week that more than 1 million tickets had been requested for Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday. Trump said Thursday he expected a crowd like “nobody’s seen before.”
By the time Trump took the stage on Saturday, less than half the arena, which can hold more than 19,000 people, was filled. The Tulsa Fire Department said attendance was “just shy of 6,200” guests. The campaign also scrapped an outside event where Trump planned to address an overflow crowd.
The pandemic likely played a role in the lower-than-expected turnout. Trump allies claimed protesters outside the event were preventing more supporters from coming inside, but reporters at the scene said that was untrue.
Teenagers on the social media platform TikTok and K-pop fans also took responsibility for suppressing turnout by requesting tickets as a prank. But Parscale said the campaign constantly weeds out fake ticket requests.
