Former President Donald Trump is trying to downplay the size of the crowds at his presidential rivals' rallies, falsely claiming that “there was no one there” at a Detroit event hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Detroit Gov. Tim Walz.
Trump, who is obsessed with the size of his crowds and frequently exaggerates attendance numbers, is “not happy” with the number of people who attended Harris and Walz campaign events, he says. Rolling Stone It was reported last week.
“Did anyone notice that Kamala cheated at the airport?” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “There was no one on the plane, and she ‘turned it on’ and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of alleged followers, but they were not there! She was handed over by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd photo, but no one was there, which was later confirmed by the mirror reflection on the VP’s plane,” Trump wrote. “She is a cheater. She had no one waiting for her, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing happens with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is how Democrats win elections, by cheating.”
In a later post, Trump included a photo showing a crowd looking at the vice president's plane, and claimed without evidence: “Look, we caught it with a fake crowd. There was no one there!”
Trump is lying. Multiple news channels broadcast the event live, with the crowd clearly visible. Photographers from the Associated Press and several other national and international outlets captured images of the crowd. Local news reported that “about 15,000 people filled the hangar” and the crowd was “spilling 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 known as Twitter: “1) This is a real photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan 2) Trump hasn't campaigned in a swing state in over a week… low energy?”
Fact-checking site Snopes ran an AI analysis of the image and concluded that it was “96% human-generated,” meaning it was likely real. Another AI analysis by Snopes found there was a 58% chance the image was not generated by AI.
The Harris campaign has indulged Trump in teasing about the apparent enthusiasm gap, posting side-by-side photos on social media of Harris rallies in the same city or location as Trump events, pointing out the empty seats and relatively smaller crowds at Trump's speeches.
On Thursday, Trump repeatedly falsely claimed that the crowd at his “Stop the Steal” speech on January 6, which immediately preceded the Capitol attack, had “as many people, if not 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 was “paying for her crowd.” At his rally on Friday, the former president lied that 107,000 people came to see him speak in New Jersey and another 80,000 people came to his rally in South Carolina. Both numbers are patently false.
Trump’s lies about crowds go back years. In 2017, his then-White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said that press secretary Sean Spicer’s claims that Trump’s inauguration had “the largest crowd ever to witness an inauguration, period” (another obvious exaggeration) were not lies but “alternative facts.” Spicer has since admitted that he did not cover the inauguration. Rolling Stone Trump has exaggerated the number of attendees and said he regrets it. But it seems unlikely that Trump will make such an admission.
