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.
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.