Somebody’s getting fired over this

| 7:37 pm EDT June 20, 2020
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Donald Trump said a million people were planning to attend his Tulsa rally tonight. In reality, so few people showed up, large chunks of the indoor arena are still empty, and the overflow stage outside has no crowd at all. It’s difficult to say how much of this is due to coronavirus fears, and how much of it is due to Trump’s collapsing popularity. But one thing is for sure: somebody’s getting fired.

The Trump campaign took a huge risk by putting on this rally during a pandemic. The campaign had to know that Donald Trump would end up looking foolish if a small-ish crowd showed up. Yet the campaign was clearly desperate to sell Trump on the notion that he’s still hugely popular, and that he can draw a massive crowd no matter what.

The truly weird part is that Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale bragged about how a million people had supposedly said they planned to attend, thus raising expectations even further. By the time Parscale resorted to making these claims, he had to have already been seeing weak signup numbers, meaning he made things even worse by creating false expectations.

So now the question is whether Donald Trump fires Parscale for this debacle, or if he decides to scapegoat someone else instead. The campaign is already floating the hilarious false claim that attendance is only low because protesters and the media somehow blocked Trump fans from getting through the metal detectors. But while Trump is fairly senile at this point, we can’t imagine that even he’ll buy this.