Comedian Sarah Cooper is back with a new video mocking Donald Trump’s recent, hilarious-in-hindsight comments about crowd size expectations for his Tulsa rally that didn’t remotely pan out.
In the clip Cooper, known for her videos on TikTok and Twitter in which she lip syncs audio of Donald Trump speaking on various topical issues, mimes an interview Trump gave Friday afternoon where he talked up what he said was huge demand to see him speak. As Cooper can be seen slouching lower and lower in her chair, she puts particularly cringe-inducing emphasis on Trump’s boasts about an expected “record-setting crowd,” including the claim that more than “a million” people wanted to attend, as well as his unfounded assertion that his rallies “never had an empty seat.”
And as the audio clip of Trump ends with the president saying there won’t be an empty seat in Oklahoma, Cooper-as-Trump falls right out of her chair and onto the floor.
As heard in the audio used in Cooper’s video, the Trump campaign expected hundreds of thousands of supporters to show up for the rally at BOK Center in Tulsa, originally scheduled for Juneteenth but changed to June 20th after Trump’s campaign was accused of selecting the date as a racist dog whistle. And Trump wasn’t alone. In the days leading up to the event, his campaign manager Brad Parscale openly bragged about how many people were signing up to attend.
The Trump campaign was so confident about demand that it set up an outdoor overflow area for attendees who couldn’t get seats inside the center, and Trump even scheduled in a brief appearance for that crowd prior to the main event — something Parscale also bragged about. Unfortunately, attendance was dramatically lower than expected. So few people showed up in fact that the overflow area was dismantled hours before the main rally’s 8:00 p.m. start time.
And inside the BOK Center things were even worse. Fewer than 6,200 people attended the rally, well less than 1/3 of the venue’s 19,199 capacity, and instantly viral photos showed Trump supporters clustered together surrounded by empty section after empty section.
The Trump campaign’s inflated expectations for attendees could in part be thanks to K-Pop stans and TikTok users who said they placed millions of ticket reservations for the rally with the intention of never showing up, though other observers have noted that the ticket reservations weren’t guarantees. Entrance was still granted on a first come, first serve basis and as the empty seats testify, anyone who actually wanted to attend the event could have gotten in.
Watch Cooper’s video below:
How to empty seat pic.twitter.com/SxDJ5M1sdN
— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) June 22, 2020