Much like the start of his Presidency when top aides claimed crowd estimates at his Inauguration were too low, President Donald Trump's campaign on Sunday disputed crowd figures for his first campaign rally in over three months, as the Tulsa Fire Marshal's office said only 6,200 people attended the event.
"12,000 people made it past protestors thorough the metal detectors," said Trump Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, as campaign officials alternately blamed demonstrators and the news media for depressing turnout at the rally.
It was a dramatic change from the days before the rally, when Trump Campaign Manager Brad Parscale was talking about how over a million people had signed up for tickets.
"The crowds are unbelievable," the President said to reporters on Saturday as he left the White House for the rally.
But it didn't turn out that way in Tulsa, as whole sections in the upper bowl of the arena were empty when the President started his speech.
The President had been talking excitedly for days about the rally, his first since early March, as the 2020 campaign was sidelined by the Coronavirus outbreak.
"It's a crowd like, I guess, nobody has seen before," the President said last Thursday, during an roundtable with the Governor of Oklahoma.
"We have tremendous requests for tickets, like I think probably has never happened politically before," the President added.
As the number of requests for tickets went up all week - finally clearing over 1 million - the Trump Campaign went so far as to build an outside stage, so the President could address those unable to get inside the BOK Center in Tulsa.
But it wasn't needed.
The Trump Campaign denied stories that TikTok users had sabotaged the event by signing up for huge numbers of tickets.
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