Trump vs. K-Pop

Would be very surprised if Brad Parscale still has a job in a few days.

• overhyped expectations for Trump's Tulsa rally solely based on online ticket requests

• spent thousands and wasted the time of the President AND Vice President on a second stage event that was cancelled at the last minute for lack of people

• the data collection for the rally (the REAL reason the Trump campaign holds these) is completely burned to the ground thanks to K-pop and Tiktok fans mobilizing to make tens of thousands of burner accounts, making the data haul for the rally useless. Given the fact they used those fake accounts as a judge of how many people were actually going to show up (thus that unused second stage) the campaign was caught completely by surprise by this. Not surprising, they're so incompetent they do no data validation whatsoever. Whoops.

• did not prepare the candidate at all so that he spent an hour and a half meandering about how hard it is to walk down ramps (this was mostly Trump's fault since he refuses to prepare for anything, it resembling actual work, but Parscale will still get blamed)

• thanks to this fiasco the Trump campaign is off center now; the plan was to lead into more big rallies immediately to gin up enthusiasm (of Trump's voters and Trump himself) and that isn't going to happen

2020 isn't going to be 2016. In 2016, there were essentially two campaigns - Trump's fly-by-night spend-as-little-as-possible gang of pirates which used rallies and earned media and nothing else, and the establishment GOP network which ran something approaching a normal campaign.

There is no more establishment GOP. It's all Trump, as his cronies spent the past 4 years taking over the entire party and purging anyone not sufficiently loyal to Dear Leader. And now we get to watch the results.

Make popcorn.