Four-and-a-half months before Trump faces voters, Tulsa serves as a touchpoint for a campaign that increasingly appears to be in a state of crisis.
A sea of empty seats in a Tulsa arena Saturday set off a furious round of finger-pointing and recriminations around President Trump’s campaign that continued through Monday, amplifying the president and his team’s struggle to find their footing amid multiple national and political crises.
Trump has fumed about his campaign manager Brad Parscale over the half-empty arena, campaign officials are engaged in whisper campaigns against their colleagues and some Trump allies are calling for a dramatic reorganization of the reelection machine, according to several current and former administration and campaign officials.
On Monday, the campaign announced that two additional staff members tested positive for the coronavirus after attending the rally in Tulsa on Saturday. Six members of the campaign advance team tested positive for covid-19 before the rally.
Four-and-a-half months before Trump faces voters, Tulsa serves as a touchpoint for a campaign that increasingly appears to be in a state of crisis. Far behind in the polls and struggling to find a clear and effective message against Democratic rival Joe Biden, Trump has turned a skeptical eye on his own campaign — raising the prospect of the kind of reshuffling that took place in 2016 after bouts of infighting, chaos and negative headlines.
“The campaign completely screwed up on this rally,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. “I don’t know how it would be possible to misalign expectations more than they did here. If I’m Parscale, I’m thinking about how many people did Trump go through last cycle? All of that said, I think Joe Biden would have had six people there. If Trump can pull 6,000, Biden wouldn’t be able to pull 100.”
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who has long fixated on crowd size — was upset over the crowd of 6,200 at the 19,000-seat arena in Tulsa. Before the event, Trump said he expected tens of thousands of supporters to be there.
“He’s quite pleased with how the rally went,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Monday, before reading from a slip of paper handed to her at the briefing room podium about millions of people who viewed the rally on television.
Tim Murtaugh, who released statements on Saturday and Monday confirming coronavirus cases among campaign staff in Tulsa, said Trump’s crowd dwarfed the typical gathering for a Biden event.
“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, which is real and wide,” he said.
Murtaugh said Trump was “eager” to continue holding rallies, despite the fears about coronavirus and nationwide protests over racial injustice, in which Trump has been denounced repeatedly.
Trump’s reelection team and other allies have already begun thinking of how to retool the traditional campaign rally to avoid a repeat of the Tulsa affair, after a promised crowd of tens of thousands never showed up and a second stage built for the president to address an overflow crowd had to be quickly dismantled.
Some campaign officials are pushing for future rallies to take place outdoors, possibly returning to the kind of airplane hangar events Trump used frequently in 2016.
