You’d think Trump and his personal enforcers—aka, the police—would celebrate any legitimate ticket holder seeking to attend his woefully underwhelming rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma yesterday.
Alas, that was not the case. Yesterday, MSNBC news cameras outside of the BOK center in Tulsa captured officers from the Tulsa Police Department handcuffing Sheila Buck, a kindergarten teacher wearing a shirt with the words “I Can’t Breathe,” which have been a refrain at recent Black Lives Matter protests:
“I was surrounded and was told I could not go any further and that I was trespassing on a private event and I wasn’t wanted there,” Buck recounted her arrest to Tulsa World, reiterating that she had a ticket for the event.
But that didn’t matter a bit to the police in the area, who seemed to fully embrace it as their job to do whatever the Trump campaign directed them to.
“It is their event, and they requested it,” police spokesperson Jeanne Pierce told Tulsa World when asked why Buck was arrested.
“Whether she had a ticket or not for the event is not a contributing factor for the Tulsa police in making the arrest,” Pierce added. “Officers at the location, particularly in the ‘sterile’ area, will remove individuals only at the direction of campaign staff.”
Buck was later booked to a Tulsa Jail on a complaint of obstructing officers.
Meanwhile, the gathering of MAGA followers fell far below the Trump campaign’s expectations. Despite the President tweeting ahead of the rally that almost one million people had registered to attend, dispatches from media at BOK center on Saturday revealed that the showing was a little…scraggly:
The less-than-impressive turnout is now being attributed to some epic trolling from teens on Tik Tok, according to a report from CNN:
A coordinated effort was underway on TikTok in the days leading up to Trump’s Saturday rally, encouraging people to register online for the free event and not show up. TikTok is normally thought of as a platform for dancing teenagers and not, necessarily, political action.
It’s not hard to imagine that Gen Z outsmarted the band of fools running the Trump campaign, though the latter is now denying that the coordinated action (or, I don’t know, the fact that there is a pandemic currently happening!) accounts for the pathetic showing at the rally in Tulsa.
“We had legitimate 300k signups of Republicans who voted in the last four elections. Those are not [TikTok] kids,” a campaign official told CNN. “It was fear of violent protests.”
Thank God the cops got Sheila Buck then.