Donald Trump’s Obsession With Crowd Size Reaches a New Low

At Donald Trump’s Thursday’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the former president compared himself favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.

After incorrectly claiming that “no one was killed on January 6th,” Trump went on to gloat that the crowd at his insurrection rally was larger than the March On Washington, which Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” said the former president. “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech and you look at ours...we had more.”

Growing ever more furious at this perceived slight, Trump began throwing (made up) numbers around. King, he said, spoke to a million (actually 250,000) people. But, according to Trump, the January 6th crowd actually looks just as big in photographs as King’s! and yet the biased experts insist that only spoke to 25,000 would-be insurrectionists and rioters (actually 10,000).

One could give Trump the benefit of the doubt, maybe he is experiencing a “senior moment” and actually confusing his (famously sparsely attended) inauguration and the events of January 6, 2021.

Clearly, the Republican presidential nominee is rattled by the massive crowds that have greeted Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz over the past week. Early Thursday morning, Trump took to Truth Social to complain. “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.” 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!” In the same press conference, Trump also made the same point in an arguably even madder fashion. (It is, in fact, difficult to think of another moment where he was this angry.)

In the past, Trump has drawn large crowds, perhaps even approaching that 100,000 number, but certainly January 6 was not one of them—or one to brag about.

Donald Trump tried Thursday to explain away his apparent staycation amid a tightening presidential race, but unfortunately for the former president, his numbers just didn’t add up.

Ever since Trump’s rally in Atlanta this past weekend, the former president has been lying low at home. Meanwhile, his running mate, J.D. Vance, has seemingly been sent to follow Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz across the country, to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

During a press conference from the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, Trump was asked about his apparent pause in public appearances. He didn’t take it well.

“You have not had a public campaign event for nearly a week now; tomorrow you’ll be in Montana, which is not a swing state,” said one reporter. “Some of your allies have expressed concern that you’re not taking this race seriously, particularly—”

“What a stupid question,” Trump interjected.

“At a time where there is enthusiasm on the other side. Why haven’t you been campaigning this week?” the reporter asked.

“Uh, because I’m leading by a lot and because I’m letting their convention go through,” Trump said, implying he had taken a step back before immediately contradicting himself. “And I am campaigning a lot.”

Trump then claimed that he’d kept busy working on “commercials that are at a level that anybody’s ever done before.”

The Republican nominee also said that he’d been doing remote interviews.

“I’m speaking to you on phones, I’m speaking to radio, I’m speaking to television. Uh, television is coming over here,” Trump said. “Excuse me, what are we doing right now?”

Earlier this week, Trump called in to Fox & Friends to push the baseless claim that Harris had picked Walz out of antisemitism against another contender, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, but he couldn’t get through it without reviving his own offensive comments about Jewish voters.

Trump then criticized Harris for not speaking more with the press. “She’s not doing any news conferences. You know why she’s not doing [them]? She doesn’t know how to do a news conference. She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump said Thursday.

This claim seems to be a new line of attack for Trump and Vance, who made a comment about it Wednesday on the tarmac in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Someone close to Harris’s campaign told Politico that there was little “incentive” for Harris to speak more with the press. “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out,” they said.

As for Trump’s claim that he’s “leading by a lot,” that’s not necessarily clear.

When listing recent polls that had him ahead, Trump cited a recent Rasmussen Reports survey published Thursday, which found that Trump was leading 49 percent to 44 percent. Rasmussen was recently dropped from the national poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, after it was determined to be too right-leaning to be considered reliable.

Trump cited a CNBC poll published Thursday that found the former president to have a two-point lead over his opponent. He also mentioned an MSNBC poll that placed him ahead, but such a poll did not appear to exist.

While Trump claimed he’d taken the lead in swing states, an Ipsos poll published Thursday found that the two candidates were neck and neck, with Harris taking a slight lead. On Wednesday, two key national poll aggregators found that after months of struggling, the Democratic Party’s candidate had overtaken Trump in the polls.

Trump is well aware that he’s beginning to struggle in the polls—apparently, it’s driving him nuts.

Donald Trump hasn’t let up on insisting that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently became Black.

During a bumbling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee deflected a direct question probing his reasoning for claiming that the biracial Democrat had “turned Black.”

“Kamala Harris’s father is Jamaican American, and she went to a historically Black college,” prompted a reporter, referring to Harris’s attendance at Howard University. “How is she only recently deciding to be Black?”

“You’ll have to ask her that question because she’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it,” Trump said. “But I’ve known her a long time, I actually contributed to her campaign a long time ago, because I was a developer—I contributed to lots of campaigns, to Democrats, Republicans; some were liberal, some were conservative, but you’ll have to ask her about that.

“To me it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “But to her, from her standpoint, I think it’s very disrespectful to both, really. Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both. To me it doesn’t matter.”

Trump’s outrageous claim sprang up at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, when the 78-year-old white candidate tried and failed to curry favor with the crowd by trash-talking Harris’s racial identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said at the convention, seemingly unable to grasp how a person could have two parents from different cultures but still manage to appreciate both. (More than 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2020 census, is multiracial.)

Donald Trump announced Thursday he has agreed to debate Vice President Kamala in not just one September debate but three.

The news of the three new dates, however, didn’t arrive without a confusing flub. In the middle of a rambling, short-notice press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced his intentions to debate Harris on September 4 on Fox News, September 10 on NBC News, and in another September 25 debate on ABC News.

But moments after Trump made the claim, it appeared he had mixed up some of the dates and their networks. Spokespeople for ABC said the network had agreed to proceed with the originally scheduled September 10 debate, while NBC News said they had agreed to host a debate on September 25, reported The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies.

“She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview,” Trump said of Harris. “But I look forward to the debates.”

Harris’s campaign reaffirmed that she would be up for the September 10 ABC News debate shortly after the details were ironed out.

Trump’s announcement came as a complete reversal of where he stood on the debates just last week, when he wrote on Truth Social that he had “terminated” the September 10 ABC News showdown over the fact that the Democratic nominee had changed when he had only agreed to debate “Sleepy Joe Biden.” In its place, Trump offered an alternative debate on Fox News in front of a live crowd, which Harris’s campaign did not sign up to.

The sudden announcement of three back-to-back debates may have been a last-ditch effort to regain lost favor with some of his fans, who were stunningly disappointed by his decision to back out of the first scheduled debate—so much so that they got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending on Truth Social after the news broke.

Stephen Miller tried to invent a new, outrageous attack against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, calling them the “number one traffickers” of “girls into sex slavery on planet Earth” on MSNBC Wednesday night.

On The Beat With Ari Melber, the former White House adviser and Trump campaign surrogate went into a rant after Melber questioned Miller about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.  

“A lot of innocent people have been persecuted by a corrupt system!” Miller shouted. “What kind of corrupt system throws Republican lawyers in jail for offering good, sound legal advice but does nothing with secretaries of state who plainly violate their own state laws and constitutions? How many people are in jail right now?

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the number one traffickers of children—girls into sex slavery on planet Earth! How many people are in jail for that?” Miller added, before Melber stepped in to cut him off. 

“We’ve gone this far—we’ve gone. We’ve gone this far in an exchange, we’re not doing just anything you want to rip off the internet that’s false. And we’re not doing defamation here!” Melber replied. “As you know, there’s other Trump allies who’ve got a lot of trouble with that. We’re not doing that here.” 

The exchange was a small part of a 30-minute interview Melber conducted with Miller, who has not reacted well to Biden stepping away from the 2024 election and Harris taking his place. He freaked out the day the news was announced, loudly complaining on Fox News.

“They held a primary!” Miller lamented at the time. “People—they had ballots! They filled out circles that went to the voting booths! They spent money on advertisements, and as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”

Miller has spent his post–White House career concern-trolling, from TV appearances attacking Democrats over immigration policies or spreading lies about Hunter Biden, to fake, culture-war-driven lawsuits over stuff like allegedly gay Pop-Tarts. His latest rant proves that the architect of the Muslim ban is a professional troll now, and will take on that role again if Donald Trump returns to the White House.