Former President Donald Trump has attempted to downplay the turnout at his presidential opponent's rallies, falsely claiming that “no one was there” at a rally in Detroit hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Gov. Tim Walz.
Trump, who is obsessed with the size of his rallies and often exaggerates attendance figures, was “unhappy” with the numbers attending Harris and Waltz's campaign events, as Rolling Stone reported last week.
“Did anyone notice that Kamala cheated at the airport?” Trump ranted on Truth Social on Sunday. “There was no one on the plane and she edited it with an 'AI' to show a horde of so-called followers, but they weren't real! An airport maintenance worker noticed the fake crowd photo and called her out, but there was no one there. It was later confirmed by the reflection in the mirror-like finish of the VP's plane,” Trump wrote. “She's a cheater. No one was waiting and the 'crowd' looked like 10,000 people! The same thing happened with the fake 'crowd' at her speech. Democrats win elections by cheating.”
In a later post, Trump included a photo of a crowd watching the vice president's plane, claiming without evidence, “LOL, we caught her with a fake 'crowd'. There was no one there!”
Trump is lying. Multiple news channels livestreamed the event and the crowd was clearly visible. Photographers from the Associated Press and many other national and international news organizations captured attendees. Local news reported that “about 15,000 people filled the hangar” and that the crowd “spill[ed]out onto the runway, cheering as Air Force Two arrived.”
In response to Trump's claims, the Harris campaign posted a screenshot of Trump's post and wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “1) This is an actual photo of a crowd of 15,000 people at a Harris-Waltz campaign event in Michigan. 2) Trump hasn't campaigned in a battleground state in over a week… is he down?”
Editor’s Recommendation
1) This is an actual photo of a crowd of 15,000 people at a Harris-Waltz campaign event in Michigan.
2) Trump hasn't campaigned in battleground states for over a week…running out of energy? pic.twitter.com/VgTfoMAcuk
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 11, 2024
Fact-checking organization Snopes ran an artificial intelligence analysis on the image and concluded that it was “96% human-created,” meaning it's likely to be a genuine photo. A separate AI analysis by Snopes found that there was a 58% chance that the image wasn't created by an AI.
The Harris campaign has been busy teasing Trump about the apparent disparity in enthusiasm, posting side-by-side images on social media of Ms. Harris rallies in the same cities and venues as Mr. Trump's events, pointing out the empty seats and relatively small audiences at Mr. Trump's speeches.
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On Thursday, Trump repeatedly falsely claimed that the audience for his “Stop the Steal” speech on January 6, just before the storming of the Capitol, was the same size, or even larger, than the audience for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Last week, Trump also claimed that Harris was “paying for her 'crowd.'” At a rally on Friday, the former president falsely claimed that 107,000 people showed up to his speech in New Jersey and another 80,000 to his rally in South Carolina. Both of those figures are patently false.
Trump's lies about crowds go back years. In 2017, then-White House counsel Kellyanne Conway infamously said that Press Secretary Sean Spicer's claim that Trump's inauguration drew “the largest crowd in the history of inaugurations” (another obvious exaggeration) was not a lie but merely an “alternative fact.” Spicer later admitted to Rolling Stone that he had exaggerated the attendance numbers and said he regretted it. However, it seems highly unlikely that Trump would ever admit to doing the same.
