Donald Trump is very bothered by reports that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are drawing large and enthusiastic crowds to their rallies.
“Oh, give me a break,” Trump responded during a Thursday press conference when asked if he is worried about the Democratic ticket’s crowd sizes. “Listen, I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn't report it.”
This isn’t the first time the Republican nominee for president has made this wild claim. Actual estimates of the crowd size at that Jersey Shore rally land a lot closer to 40,000 than 107,000. The last single event to draw 107,000 people in New Jersey was a Grateful Dead concert—in 1977.
Thursday’s press conference, which was held at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, was ostensibly set up so that Trump could resurface from a recent public appearance hiatus and announce he wants to debate Harris, but the MAGA leader couldn’t help but repeatedly return to the topic of crowd size.
“On crowd size, in history for any country, nobody's had crowds like I have,” Trump claimed, while talking about his sympathy for Jan. 6 insurrectionists. “The biggest crowd I've ever spoken [before] was that day. And I'll tell you, it's very hard to find a picture of that crowd.”
Trump’s wild claims about attendance at his events go back to his inauguration in 2017, when he and then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer outright lied to everyone about the ginormous turnout for his special day. Trump exhibited more of the same strange, insecure, and bombastic posturing at Thursday’s press conference.
“If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not—we had more,” he blurted out.
The speech Trump is referring to is MLK’s legendary "I Have a Dream." The civil rights icon delivered it from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. It has been estimated that nearly 250,000 were in attendance for King’s speech.
“They said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people,” Trump continued. “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything's the same because it was the fountains, the whole thing, all the way back to, from Lincoln to Washington,” he blustered.
Trump has made similar claims before, even alleging that images of the rally he presided over immediately before the Jan. 6 insurrection have been “censored.”
The Republican Party’s weirdness starts at the very top.
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