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.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.