For years, Donald Trump has been obsessed with the size of campaign-rally crowds, viewing it as a prime indicator of his political dominance. He cared so much about it that he had his own White House shamelessly lie about his inauguration attendance, in order to make him feel better.
Now, in the final three months of an uncomfortably tight presidential contest, Trump is flipping out about crowd sizes — both publicly and behind closed doors — but not, primarily, his own. According to one Republican source who’s spoken to the former president in recent days, Trump is “unhappy with the narrative” forming that Vice President Kamala Harris has been attracting high, enthusiastic attendance at the 2024 rallies she’s held since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
In private, Trump has recently taken to griping about the media attention the Harris 2024 (now Harris-Walz 2024) rally sizes have been receiving, and at times insisting a number the Harris campaign has put out must be “fake,” the source and another person familiar with the matter say. Publicly, he’s similarly making his displeasure very clear.
“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was – And she pays for her ‘Crowd,’” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”
Later on Thursday, Trump held a press conference from Mar-a-Lago, during which he again ranted about crowd sizes at length. “It’s so dishonest, the press,” he said, visibly frustrated, when asked about crowd sizes. “I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size,” he claimed, adding that “the Republican Party, and me as a candidate, has the enthusiasm.”
Trump later claimed that he may have drawn more supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 than “Martin Luther King when he did his speech.”
The 2024 Harris campaign is only a couple weeks old, but it has already gotten under the Republican presidential nominee’s skin in several key ways. Since Biden bowed out, national and battleground-state polls have tightened, and in some cases show Harris now leading. Trump has also expressed what confidants and aides privately concede to be genuine surprise that the Democratic vice president has managed to raise as much campaign cash as she has, and has grown visibly irritated that the Democrats’ attacks on Trump and J.D. Vance for being “weird” have dominated news cycles lately.
Harris and newly minted running mate Tim Walz packed a Philadelphia basketball arena to the rafters on Tuesday, the first stop on the ticket’s swing-state tour. The Harris campaign was quick to troll Trump over the crowd size, posting side-by-side images of the crowd on Tuesday and Trump’s relatively meager crowd in the same area.
The enthusiasm for Harris and Walz didn’t drop off after their kickoff event, with video showing a massive line of cars waiting to get into their rally in Wisconsin the following day hours in advance. The duo was greeted by another massive crowd in Detroit later on Wednesday.
Trump only has one rally scheduled this week, in Montana on Friday. During a rally at Georgia State University in Atlanta last week, he bashed school administrators for not allowing more people into the venue, claiming that “thousands of people were told no.”
The Trump campaign itself said 600 people — not thousands — were denied entry, according to Reuters, which reported that the crowd was “thinning out noticeably” as Trump spoke.
