It must have been his triumphant return. However, for his first campaign meeting since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Donald Trump did not sell out on Saturday, June 20, in Tulsa, in the center of the United States.

While the American president announced, Monday, nearly a million registrations, he finally could not fill a room of 20,000 seats in this republican stronghold. The retransmission planned outside the room for the unlucky ones, who would not have had access to it, was purely and simply canceled at the last minute.

A video panorama view inside the arena for @realDonaldTrump rally in Tulsa. pic.twitter.com/h4H8r60YwQ

- Jeff Mason (@ jeffmason1) June 20, 2020

How to explain this flop? On social networks, teenagers followers of the video sharing platform TikTok, as well as fans of K-pop, claim to be partly responsible for it.

A digital action

After Donald Trump's campaign team posted tickets to the Tulsa meeting, K-pop fan accounts began to encourage subscribers to register for the meeting and not attend .

Quickly, this slogan spread on TikTok, where videos intimating this instruction made the buzz, as CNN pointed out before the meeting.

"Oh no! I signed up for a Trump rally, and I can't go!", Quips a woman, feigning a cough, in a TikTok video dated June 15, made unavailable since then.

So my teen daughter, who has Snapchat and TikTok accounts, walked in and said to me "So did it work? Did the teens get all the tickets to the Trump rally?" She's known about this ALL WEEK and I just learned this an hour ago ... https://t.co/lcsB50zzoR

- Roberto Quinlan (@r_quinla) June 21, 2020

"The Twitter of K-pop fans and Alt TikTok [a fringe of TikTok claiming to be more artistic than ordinary users, editor's note] have a good alliance and information circulates very quickly between them. They know all the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get their way, "said YouTuber Elijah Daniels to the New York Times, who himself participated in the anti-Trump campaign. "The majority of participants deleted their posts after 24 hours because we did not want to sell the wick to the Trump campaign. These teenagers are intelligent and they have thought of everything," he said.

Highly engaged communities ed s alongside black lives matter

It would not be the first time that these communities have taken action against President Donald Trump. During the month of June, they helped to make invisible hashtags presenting themselves as alternatives to #BlackLivesMatter (the life of blacks counts) like #WhiteLivesMatters (the life of whites matters) or #MAGA (Make America great again, the slogan from Trump). To do this, they shared in mass memes and other images that had absolutely nothing to do with these hashtags, in order to drown racist publications

They also claim the deactivation of a Dallas police application. The latter called on citizens to send them videos of illegal activities during the Black Lives Matter protests.

Some quickly responded by drowning out mentions of the police account with photographs, videos, but also photos and video montages of their favorite artists. Others did the same on the application. A few hours later, the Texas city police said the application was no longer working "due to technical problems".

As Michelle Cho, a teacher-researcher at the University of Toronto in Canada notes, this audience seems particularly sensitive to this type of theme.

"K-pop fan groups are mainly composed of non-white people, considerably queer, and very present on social networks. Awareness of racial and cultural issues is one of the main characteristics around which fan conventions like KCON revolve. "she wrote on Twitter. 

North American K-pop fandoms are predominantly poc, significantly queer, and extremely online, so I agree with @flourish; csness raising about race and cultural sensitivity is a main feature of fan conventions like KCON.

- Michelle Cho (@ mhc727) June 1, 2020

Republicans  accusethe media and "radicals"

The Trump camp has found other explanations for the low attendance in Tulsa. For Donald Trump campaign director Brad Parscale, these disappointing figures are due to "a week of apocalyptic media coverage" and "radical protesters "which would have prevented access to the stadium.

Democrat representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez immediately replied that they had been taken in by adolescents of whom "she was proud".

KPop allies, we see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice too 😌

- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 21, 2020

"Teenagers in America dealt Donald Trump a blow. Teenagers all over America ordered tickets for this event. And the campaign team fools bragged about a million tickets," said Steve. Schmidt, an anti-Trump Republican, on Twitter.

This is what happened tonight. I'm dead serious when I say this. The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump. All across America teens ordered tickets to this event. The fools on the campaign bragged about a million tickets. lol. @ProjectLincoln.

- Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) June 20, 2020

Other Republicans, like Ed Rollins, blame Donald Trump's strategy error. According to him, it was a bad idea for the campaign to organize a rally, while the Covid-19 continues to spread to the United States. The campaign team’s inability to meet public expectations was a worrying sign of its incompetence, he told the LA Times.

To add to the embarrassment, the Trump campaign reported on Saturday that six members of the team organizing the rally in Tulsa had tested positive for coronavirus.

Whether he was the victim of a coordinated attack or a simple strategic error, the Tulsa meeting marks a failure for Donald Trump. Barely in the polls behind Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, he will have to find another solution to breathe new life into his campaign.

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