Trump’s people carefully framed photos of the Tulsa rally to make it appear that more people attended--reminiscent of what they did with the 2017 Inauguration photos
Posted 06.21.20; updated 06.22.20
We all know now that the Trump campaign was played by a group of Zoomers who reserved many tickets to Trump’s rally in Tulsa. But given the fact that no limit was placed on the number of reserved tickets, it appears that many people simply did not choose to come to the rally.
According to The Hill, estimates of the attendance numbers at the 19,000 seat BOK Center ranged from under 6200 (Tulsa Fire Dept. figures based on “scanned tickets” but not including the press, campaign personnel, and “box suites”) to about 12,000 (campaign figures based on folks who went through “metal detectors”). Still, whichever numbers you consider, the BOK Center was certainly nowhere near filled to capacity.
In the photo above there are empty seats in the top middle to right tier. The photo below [caption added] is a close-up of part of the unfilled tier.
But you’d never know that from the photos on Trump’s twitter account, which were seemingly carefully framed to only show the more densely packed parts of the BOK Center:
This is reminiscent of what happened during the 2017 election when a National Parks photographer cropped some of the Inauguration photos to make it look like the crowd was bigger than it was.
According to The Guardian:
“A government photographer edited official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger following a personal intervention from the president, according to newly released documents.
“The photographer cropped out empty space ‘where the crowd ended’ for a new set of pictures requested by Trump on the first morning of his presidency, after he was angered by images showing his audience was smaller than Barack Obama’s in 2009....
“The records detail a scramble within the National Park Service (NPS) on 21 January 2017 after an early-morning phone call between Trump and the acting NPS director, Michael Reynolds. They also state that Sean Spicer, then White House press secretary, called NPS officials repeatedly that day in pursuit of the more flattering photographs.”
Same old same old.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...
