Report: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner are 'pissed' at Trump campaign manager over Tulsa rally crowd size

A section of the audience at Trump's Tulsa rally.
(Image credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Trump is "furious" over how small the crowd was at his rally Saturday night in Tulsa, several people close to the White House told NBC News on Sunday, having been promised a massive audience by his campaign manager, Brad Parscale.

Trump isn't the only one perturbed — CNN reports that his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner are both "pissed" at Parscale for "overpromising on crowd size." They have "every right to be," a person from the Trump campaign told CNN, adding that Parscale "gave adversaries and media a gift. It was overconfidence."

The Tulsa event was Trump's first rally since March. The BOK Center can hold about 19,000 people; the Trump campaign had boasted that more than one million people registered for tickets, and a local official estimated that 100,000 supporters would head down to the arena. The Tulsa fire marshal told NBC News only about 6,200 people attended the rally, and an overflow area meant to hold thousands wasn't used at all. After the event, Parscale tried to pin the blame elsewhere, tweeting and retweeting claims that protesters and the media scared Trump supporters away.

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Trump is all about the visuals, and outside advisers said it looked terrible to have so many empty seats in the venue, with one telling NBC News, "This was a major failure." Another shared that Trump was mad before the rally even started, because the news that six members of his advance team tested positive for COVID-19 overshadowed the actual event.

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Catherine Garcia

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.