Tulsa County Reports New Daily High For Coronavirus Cases One Day After Trump Campaign Rally
WHITFIELD: Welcome back. Tulsa County, Oklahoma is reporting another record high for new daily coronavirus cases just one day after President Trump held his first rally in months in that city. Cases in the area now spiking after President Trump told his supporters just last night that he wanted coronavirus testing slowed down. CNN's Martin Savidge joining me now from Tulsa, what more can you tell us about this spike?</s>MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Fred. Just about every day that we have been here in Tulsa, there has been a new record for 24- hour increases in coronavirus. The latest now is 143 new cases in Tulsa County. And then if you take a look at the state, the very day that the president came in to do this rally, Oklahoma rolled over the 10,000 number, and as of today it's 10,515. So it only verifies what health officials have been saying, that there is a definite spike going on in Tulsa and that it was completely the wrong time to have any sort of large gathering, like a rally, to be held in this city. Fred?</s>WHITFIELD: But they're not necessarily making the correlation that the spike is directly impacted because of the rally, because many experts, doctors will say it takes a few days before people might test positive after exposure. So let me ask you too, martin, about what CNN is learning about Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump and how upset apparently they are with Trump Campaign Manager Brad Parscale about his predictions of a much larger crowd than the one that actually turned out for the rally in Tulsa.</s>SAVIDGE: Right. Well, the numbers originally have been huge. I mean, of course, they talked about a million people online that had taken an interest, the city had talked about 100,000 showing. 20,000 were supposed to fill the BOK Center, none of that happened. The question is why. The fire marshal is actually reporting today that there were only 6,200 people inside of the BOK Center. The Trump campaign was pushing back. They say it was actually double that number that they saw. However, we should point out, the fire marshal is counting bodies in the building whereas the campaign seems to have counting those who may have gone through the metal detector. What we will never know is really how many people may have been put off by the real numbers of increasing coronavirus and not comfortable with being in the close confines of that building. And then there is the other aspect that the campaign itself, by saying how many people were going to be here might have actually frightened others off when they heard 100,000 people at downtown Tulsa, they're not used to that kind of crowd. There could have been many who felt that that was too large a crowd for them to want to navigate so they simply stayed home to watch it on T.V. Fredricka?</s>WHITFIELD: Yes. Bottom line, when you look at the pictures of the arena and there were a lot of empty blue seats, perhaps underscoring that 6,200 number. All right, Martin Savidge, thank you so much. The Trump campaign is dismissing the possibility that a social media campaign -- see, see the crowd right there or this size there in the arena, well, there's a lot of disputing now, that campaign saying that there were some exaggeration or perhaps they were confused about the expectations. This after the president bragged on Twitter about having received a million ticket requests but many of those who requested tickets may have been trolling the president after a video went viral on the social media platform, TikTok, encouraging people to register for the event online with no intention of ever showing up. The woman who appears to be responsible for the social media campaign spoke this morning to our Brian Stelter about that effort.</s>BRIAN STELTER, CNN CHIEF MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: How much of an impact do you think this online prank actually had in Tulsa yesterday?</s>MARY JO LAUPP, STARTED TIKTOK CAMPAIGN AGAINST TRUMP RALLY: I honestly can't tell you because this isn't -- the social media systems are generationally. So when I shared the video, let's say, my video shared 700 times, but each of those people would have people sharing their copies of it, so that's 700 more people I never saw. So it's impossible to tell for sure.</s>WHITFIELD: CNN's Donie O'Sullivan joins me now from New York. So, Donie, what more can you tell us about this?</s>DONIE O'SULLIVAN, CNN REPORTER: Yes. Well, first thing we should point out here, Fred, is that, as the Trump campaign itself said, there wasn't a cap on the number of people that could request tickets here. So it wasn't as if these TikTokers were blocking real Trump supporters from going to the rally in some way. So the fact that the Trump campaign was unable to fill this 20,000 capacity arena isn't the TikTokers fault. But what we did see all week was the campaign, even the president himself boasting about the amount of people that have requested tickets, they said a million people. And it's very likely now that that number was inflated in part due to this TikTok campaign. What was going on all week was this massive push for mostly young people and using TikTok and some other social media platforms to register for the event and not go, even including some K-pop, South Korean music fans who are really among the most organized people on the internet. Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager, said in a statement today, however, that leftist and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking that they somehow impacted rally attendance don't know what they're talking about or how our rallies work. Registering for rally means you RSVP'd with a cell phone number we constantly weed out bogus numbers. These ticket requests never factored into our thinking. But if they did really weed out all of this, that does beg the question, where were these real 1 million people? And I think that's something that the Trump campaign is grappling with today.</s>WHITFIELD: All right. Donie O'sullivan, thank you so much. All right, next, chaos in Minneapolis as a gunman goes on a rampage, shooting a dozen people and at least one person who died. So what happened? That story, ahead.