Nothing seems to irritate Donald Trump more than the idea that someone—anyone—might be drawing a bigger crowd than he. His latest target? Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he’s wrongly accusing of conjuring up massive rally crowds with a little help from artificial intelligence. According to the former president, the people showing up for his Democratic rival aren’t just enthusiastic supporters, but AI-generated figments of the digital imagination.
The drama began when Trump, never one to miss a chance to flex his creative conspiracy muscles, took to Truth Social to claim that Harris had “cheated” by using AI to inflate her rally numbers. Trump, ever the self-proclaimed master of crowd sizes, was outraged over a photo showing 15,000 people at a Harris-Walz rally in Michigan. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he fumed, alleging that a maintenance worker supposedly blew the whistle on Harris’s non-existent crowd. According to Trump, the reflection on the Vice Presidential Plane proved there was no one there.
This isn’t Trump’s first foray into the world of alternative crowd counting. Remember when he claimed that his January 6th rally drew more people than Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic March on Washington? At a recent Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump doubled down on it, suggesting that his rally outshone King’s historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” he bragged. King’s audience was about 250,000 strong, but Trump, never shy with numbers, insisted his supporters were pushing the seven-figure mark. In reality, only about 10,000 showed up.
There’s no mistaking Trump’s relentless obsession with crowd sizes. The Harris campaign, not missing a beat, clapped back on social media, sharing the photo of that 15,000-strong rally and throwing some shade Trump’s way. “This is an actual photo,” the post read, along with a cheeky reminder that Trump hasn’t campaigned in a swing state in over a week.
As Harris’s campaign continues to pick up steam, with bigger crowds, better polling, and a boost in fundraising, Trump’s accusations are starting to sound more like sour grapes than serious claims. In the end, Trump’s fixation on crowd sizes might just be his way of coping with the reality that he’s no longer the main attraction–at least for now.
