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.
