Mother Of All Rallies (MOAR): Pro-Trump Rally Hoped For A Million People, A Few Hundred Showed Up
A pro-Trump rally, deemed “The Mother of All Rallies” (or, MOAR) by its organizers, hoped to draw a million people to the National Mall in Washington on Saturday in a show of support for the president and his policies. About 150 showed up.
As Bustle reports, event organizer Tommy E. Hodges Jr., who also uses the names “TommyGunn” and “The P***ed off American” on his various social media accounts, had hoped to bring at least a million people to the event.
“[Our goal is] to rally 1 million patriots to Washington D.C. to send a shock-wave message to the world that they have to go through us to take this country or change its culture.”
On Facebook, the event had trouble gaining any real traction. Around 2,000 people marked themselves as “Going” to the event, while another 6,000 were “Interested.”
The number of actual attendees was less than 200 people, according to estimates by Will Sommer, campaign editor for the Hill, who covered the event.
Although the event was not specifically tied to any specific cause — say, the removal of a Confederate monument — observers on the ground noted that a handful of participants were observed wearing regalia from white nationalist groups.
They call today’s pro-Trump the Mother of All Rallies (#MOAR). Here’s how the crowd right now, almost 4hrs in, compares to the Women’s March pic.twitter.com/lWkHvY3Oa4
— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) September 16, 2017
As it turned out, the “Mother Of All Rallies” was eclipsed in size and scope by two other rallies also held in Washington on Saturday.
As NPR News reports, Saturday-afternoon political rallies are a dime a dozen in Washington, and this most recent Saturday was no exception.
One rally, The Protect American Democracy Rally, was intended to call upon the president to respond to supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The biggest rally on Saturday, however, was a gathering of fans of the band Insane Clown Posse. Fans of the “horror core” hip-hop duo, sometimes called “Juggalos,” have been referred to by the FBI as a “loosely organized hybrid gang.”
About 1,500 juggalos staged an all-day rally & concert in DC to protest alleged class-based discrimination by cops. https://t.co/5aAEvCCu1N
— WJZ | CBS Baltimore (@cbsbaltimore) September 17, 2017
The Juggalos marched to protest their designation as a “gang,” and according to WJZ-TV (Baltimore), the event drew about 1,500 fans.
That means that the Juggalo rally eclipsed the pro-Trump rally by tenfold, depending on which estimates you believe.
Despite concerns that attendees of the three rallies might cross paths with each other and erupt in violence, the three events kept largely to themselves and there were no incidents.
[Featured Image by Jose Luis Magana/AP]
