For years, Donald Trump has been obsessed with the size of crowds at campaign rallies, viewing them as a key indicator of his political dominance. He was so obsessed with them that he shamelessly had the White House lie about his attendance at his inauguration, just to make himself feel better.
Now, in the final three months of an uncomfortably close presidential contest, Trump has begun to bristle at crowd sizes — both publicly and behind closed doors — but not primarily his own. According to a Republican source who has spoken to the former president in recent days, Trump is “unhappy with the narrative” that is emerging that Vice President Kamala Harris has been drawing large, enthusiastic attendance at the 2024 rallies she has held since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
In private, Trump has recently begun to grumble about the media attention the Harris 2024 rally (now Harris-Walls 2024) has received, at times insisting that the Harris campaign’s tally must be “fake,” according to the source and another person familiar with the matter. In public, he’s also been very vocal about his displeasure.
“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a rally, the press goes ‘crazy’ and talks about how ‘huge’ it is – and she pays for her ‘crowd,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. “When I have a rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, they refuse to mention the size of the crowd. Fake News is the enemy of the people!”
Harris’s 2024 campaign is only a few weeks old, but she has already upset the Republican presidential nominee in several key ways. Since Biden dropped out, national and battleground state polls have gotten tougher, and in some cases Harris now appears to be ahead. Trump has also expressed what confidants and aides privately acknowledge is genuine surprise that the Democratic vice president has managed to raise as much campaign money as she has, and he has become visibly irritated that Democrats’ attacks on Trump and J.D. Vance for being “weird” have dominated the news cycle recently.
Harris and her new running mate Tim Walz packed a Philadelphia basketball arena on Tuesday, the first stop on a swing-state tour. The Harris campaign was quick to criticize Trump for the size of the crowd, posting side-by-side photos of Tuesday’s crowd and Trump’s relatively small turnout in the same area.
The enthusiasm for Harris and Walz did not wane after the event began, with video showing a huge line of cars waiting to enter their Wisconsin rally the next day, hours before the event began. The duo was greeted by another huge crowd in Detroit later Wednesday.
Trump has held only one rally this week, in Montana, on Friday. During a rally at Georgia State University in Atlanta last week, Trump criticized the school administration for not letting more people in, 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 “visibly thinning” as Trump spoke.
