Former President Donald Trump is trying to downplay the size of crowds at his presidential opponents’ rallies by falsely claiming that “nobody was there” at an event in Detroit hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz.
Trump, who is obsessed with the size of his own crowds and frequently exaggerates attendance figures, is “dissatisfied” with the number of people who attended Harris and Walz’s campaign rallies, 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 at the plane and she processed it with an artificial intelligence and showed a huge ‘crowd’ of so-called supporters, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was flagged by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake image of the crowd, but there was no one there, which was later confirmed by the reflection off the mirror-like surface of the Vice President’s plane,” Trump wrote. “She is a CHEAT. She had NOBODY wait and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing happens with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. That’s how Democrats win elections: by CHEATING.”
In a subsequent post, Trump attached a photo showing a crowd looking at the vice president’s plane and claimed without evidence: “See, we caught them with a fake ‘crowd.’ There was no one there!”
Trump is lying. Several news outlets live-streamed the event, with the crowd clearly visible. Photographers from the Associated Press and many other national and international media outlets captured the attendees. Local news reported that “about 15,000 people filled the hangar” and the crowd “streamed onto the tarmac and cheered as Air Force Two arrived.”
In response to Trump’s claim, the Harris team posted a screenshot of Trump’s post and wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “1) This is a real photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan. 2) Trump still hasn’t campaigned in a swing state in over a week… Low on energy?”
Fact-checking website Snopes conducted an artificial intelligence analysis of the image and concluded that it was “96% human,” meaning it was likely a real photo. Another AI analysis by Snopes found a 58% probability that the image was not created by an AI.
The Harris team is setting out to taunt Trump about the apparent enthusiasm gap by posting side-by-side pictures on social media of Harris’ rallies in the same city or venue as Trump’s events, pointing out the empty seats and comparatively smaller crowds at Trump’s speeches.
On Thursday, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that the crowd at his Stop the Steal speech on Jan. 6, delivered immediately before the Capitol attack, “included the same number of people, if not more” than at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Last week, Trump also claimed that Harris “pays for her ‘crowd.'” At his rally on Friday, the former president lied that 107,000 people came to see him speak in New Jersey and another 80,000 at his rally in South Carolina. Both figures are demonstrably false.
Trump’s lies about the crowd go back years. In 2017, his then-White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said that press secretary Sean Spicer’s claims that Trump’s inauguration had “the largest crowd ever to attend an inauguration, period” (another obvious exaggeration) were not lies but merely “alternative facts.” Spicer has since admitted that Rolling Stone that he had exaggerated the number of attendees and said he regretted doing so. However, it is highly unlikely that Trump would ever make a similar admission.
