Trump rally faces reckoning after falling short in Tulsa

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump had looked to his first rally in three months as a reset for his campaign. Instead, the sparsely
attended event in Tulsa, Oklahoma is stirring fresh questions about both his strategy and the direction of his re-election bid.
The most evident shortfall from the rally was attendance, far smaller than the overflow crowd that the president and campaign officials had promised. Yet, more significantly, in his return to the rally stage Trump struggled to escape the coronavirus pandemic and protests over police brutality, crises that are making it harder for him to focus his arguments on his Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
With the president trailing Biden in national polls and reeling from having failed to deliver his Tulsa rally as promised, the Trump campaign will face new pressure to deliver the boost needed to get his bid for a second term back on track. Trump plans to travel to two battleground states this week for speeches — Arizona on Tuesday and Wisconsin — but his campaign hasn’t yet announced another large-scale rally.
“Every campaign always has the challenge of how many announcements can you make, how many reboots can you have, official starts, unofficial starts and this campaign is no different,” said Charlie Gerow,
a Republican strategist. “The Trump campaign maybe oversold” the Tulsa rally, he said. “These things are about expectations, and they set them high.”
The coronavirus pandemic has ruined Trump’s best argument for another term — the strength of the US economy, now plunged into recession by lockdowns imposed to curb the outbreak. The Tulsa event had been planned, at least in part, to lift the president’s own morale after broad criticism for his response to the pandemic and the nationwide protests, according to officials familiar with the campaign.
The closest scrutiny may fall on Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale, who had tweeted in the run-up to Tulsa that there were more than 1 million ticket requests for the rally. Trump repeated that metric in a Fox News interview, saying it signaled “a hunger for the rallies.” But a spokesman for Tulsa’s fire department said fewer than 6,200 people were in the arena, far fewer than the arena’s 19,000-seat capacity.
The campaign blamed protesters, claiming they had blocked Trump supporters from passing through security checkpoints. That claim could not be verified, and Tulsa police described the demonstrations as largely peaceful.
Earlier this month, Parscale was called to the White House along with other top political advisers, as Trump’s standing slipped in key battleground states. Before joining Trump’s 2016 run for the White House, Parscale’s only previous political experience had been creating a website for a candidate running for tax assessor of Bexar County, Texas, who ultimately lost.
In the wake of the rally, top campaign officials played up the attention it brought. “As of Sunday morning, more than 8.3 million people had watched the President’s rally online, which doesn’t even count television viewership,” said Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman. “This is an enormous audience that Joe Biden couldn’t even begin to dream of from his basement, and we are eager to continue to highlight the enthusiasm gap.”
Trump’s campaign has made personnel changes, bringing back Jason Miller, who directed communications during the last campaign. Last month, Bill Stepien, who had been a senior political adviser and 2016 staffer, was named deputy campaign manager. Stephanie Alexander became chief of staff after serving as Trump’s battleground state director in 2016.
And Trump is also trying to sow doubts about how the election will play out, slamming efforts to expand vote by mail as rife for fraud. He tweeted that it will lead to foreign interference.
Gerow and other Republican strategists, said the Tulsa crowd size could play to Biden’s advantage, in part because of how much Parscale raised expectations. Biden’s campaign quickly seized on the attendance as evidence that Trump’s presidency is in a “tailspin,” due to his handling of coronavirus and the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.