AOC brags how teens on Chinese-owned TikTok sabotaged Trump's rally: 'Y'all make me so proud'

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) celebrated the lower-than-expected turnout for President Donald Trump's Tulsa rally on Saturday night by bragging that Trump was "ROCKED by teens on TikTok."

According to Ocasio-Cortez, teenagers on the Chinese-owned TikTok social media platform acquired tickets for Trump's rally to inflate the campaign's expected turnout.

"Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID," Ocasio-Cortez said.

"Y'all make me so proud," the New York Democrat added.

More from the New York Times:

TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump's campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign's official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.

The trend quickly spread on TikTok, where videos with millions of views instructed viewers to do the same, as CNN reported on Tuesday. "Oh no, I signed up for a Trump rally, and I can't go," one woman joked, along with a fake cough, in a TikTok posted on June 15.

YouTuber Elijah Daniel told the Times, "It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism. K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want."

"The majority of people who made them deleted them after the first day because we didn't want the Trump campaign to catch wind," Daniel explained. "These kids are smart and they thought of everything."

Unfortunately for Trump, the sabotaged worked.

The Trump campaign claimed last week that more than 1 million ticket requests had been received for the Tulsa rally, the president's first since the coronavirus pandemic shut down the world.

However, fewer than 6,200 supporters actually showed up, Forbes reported. The arena where Trump held the rally could have seated more than three times that number.

Trump's campaign blamed the disappointing turnout on protesters who they claimed were "interfering with supporters."