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Donald Trump and Mike Pence have scrapped plans to address an outdoor rally at the president's campaign event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, following reports of low attendance and a thinner-than-expected crowd inside the arena.

The campaign was set to address an "overflow" crowd that has since dwindled. On Friday, campaign director Brad Parscale touted an outdoor stage that was being built for the president.

"This will be the 1st time that POTUS speaks to BOTH crowds in person - inside & outside," he said on Twitter. "If you come to the rally and don't get into the BOK Center before it's full, you can still see the President in person!"

In a campaign statement, spokesperson Tim Murtaugh said "protesters interfered with supporters, even blocking access to metal detectors, which prevented people from entering the rally."

"Radical protesters, coupled with a relentless onslaught from the media, attempted to frighten off the president's supporters," he claimed.

One woman who was peacefully protesting while sitting on the ground outside the arena was arrested, after the campaign asked the Tulsa Police Department to remove her from the area.

Tulsa officials had anticipated 100,000 people in its downtown for the rally. The BOK Centre has a capacity of roughly 19,000 people. Roughly 400,000 people live in Tulsa, and the state's population is around 4 million people.

On 15 June, the president claimed that nearly 1 million had requested tickets to the rally.

Reports from outside and inside the rally in the hours before the president was set to appear, typically carnival-like events with crowds lined up for hours waiting to enter, show the area had yet to reach capacity.

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Originally posted by LL:
Again I ask...who pays for his trips, we?

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Originally posted by Steve Miller:
“A surprising number of attendees came dressed as empty chairs”

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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, as CNN reported on Tuesday. “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.

Thousands of other users posted similar tweets and videos to TikTok that racked up millions of views. Representatives for TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,” said the YouTuber Elijah Daniel, 26, who participated in the campaign. “K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want.”

Many users deleted their posts after 24 to 48 hours in order to conceal their plan and keep it from spreading into the mainstream internet. “The majority of people who made them deleted them after the first day because we didn’t want the Trump campaign to catch wind,” Mr. Daniel said. “These kids are smart and they thought of everything.”

Twitter users on Saturday night were quick to declare the social media campaign’s victory. “Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted in response to Mr. Parscale, who had tweeted that “radical protestors” had “interfered” with attendance.

“The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump,” added Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican strategist.

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Ms. Laupp said that many of the people who shared her video added commentary encouraging people to procure the tickets with fake names and phone numbers. In the comment section under her own video, TikTok users exchanged advice on how to acquire a Google Voice number or another internet-connected phone line.

“We all know the Trump campaign feeds on data, they are constantly mining these rallies for data,” said Ms. Laupp, who worked on several rallies for Pete Buttigieg’s campaign for president. “Feeding them false data was a bonus. The data they think they have, the data they are collecting from this rally, isn’t accurate.”

She added that several people who took part in her campaign complained that once they signed up for the rally with their real phone numbers, they couldn’t get the Trump campaign to stop texting them and sending them messages.

Mary Garcia, a 19-year-old student from California, said that she used a Google Voice number to sign up for the rally, but that two of her friends who also signed up used their real numbers and had been inundated with texts from the Trump campaign.

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Whether or not the prank to call in false tickets was the reason for the empty upper rafters at Trump’s rally, teenagers online celebrated. On Twitter, several accounts tweeted, “best senior prank ever.”

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Talking up the rally last week, Trump said nearly a million people had requested tickets to attend. “We have a 22,000-seat arena, but I think we’re going to also take the convention hall next door, and that’s going to hold 40,000 ... We expect to have a record-setting crowd. We’ve never had an empty seat, and we certainly won’t in Oklahoma.”

But they did have empty seats. Approximately 13,000 of them, according to the Tulsa Fire Marshal, who counted slightly less than 6,200 attendees at the 19,000-seat Bank of Oklahoma Arena on Saturday night.

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Early Sunday morning, it was still unclear precisely what had accounted for the massive discrepancy between the number of ticket requests the Trump campaign said it received, and the number of people who showed up in Tulsa.

But several reports suggest that a loose network of young people on TikTok may have reserved thousands of tickets they never planned to use, and encouraged their friends to do the same. If this is what actually happened, it would amount to a jaw-dropping 21st century political prank.