Former President Donald Trump is trying to downplay his presidential opponents’ rally crowd sizes, falsely claiming that “nobody was there” at a Detroit event hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Trump, who is obsessed with the size of his own crowds and frequently exaggerates attendance numbers, is “unhappy” with the number of people who have been attending Harris and Walz’s campaign events, as Rolling Stone reported last week.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump ranted Sunday on Truth Social. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane,” Trump wrote. “She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.”
In a subsequent post, Trump included an image showing a crowd looking at the vice president’s plane and claimed without evidence, “Look, we caught her with a fake ‘crowd.’ There was nobody there!”
Trump is lying. Multiple news channels broadcast the event via live stream, where the crowd is clearly visible. Photographers from The Associated Press and many other national and international outlets captured the attendees. Local news reported that “about 15,000 people filled the hangar,” and the crowd was “spilling out onto the tarmac and cheering as Air Force Two arrived.”
In response to Trump’s claim, the Harris campaign posted a screenshot of Trump’s post and wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “1) This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan 2) Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week… Low energy?”
Fact-checking outlet Snopes ran an artificial-intelligence analysis on the image that concluded it was “96% human,” meaning it was likely a genuine photograph. Another AI analysis by Snopes found a 58% chance the image was not created by AI.
The Harris campaign has indulged in trolling Trump about the apparent enthusiasm gap, posting on social media side-by-side images of Harris’ rallies in the same city or venue as Trump events, noting the empty seats and comparatively smaller crowds at Trump’s speeches.
On Thursday, Trump repeatedly and falsely alleged that the crowd at his Jan. 6 Stop the Steal speech, which immediately preceded the Capitol attack, had the “same number of people, if not, we had more” than Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Also last week, Trump claimed that Harris “pays for her ‘Crowd.’ At his Friday rally, the former president lied that 107,000 people came to see him speak in New Jersey and another 80,000 were at his rally in South Carolina. Both of those numbers are provably false.
Trump’s crowd lies go back years. In 2017, his then White House adviser Kellyanne Conway infamously said that press secretary Sean Spicer’s claims that Trump’s inauguration had the “largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period” (another obvious exaggeration) were not falsehoods but merely “alternative facts.” Spicer has since admitted to Rolling Stone that he exaggerated the number of attendees and said he regrets it. It seems highly unlikely that Trump, however, would ever make a similar admission.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”