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In the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris stepped up on the Democratic party’s presidential ticket, something keeps getting under Donald Trump’s skin: her crowd sizes.
The former president has long been fixated on the number of people his campaign rallies draw – from vastly over-inflating his 2017 inauguration to, last week, falsely suggesting his January 6 2021 rally was larger than Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” crowd.
Now, as Trump continues to lash out at his Democratic rival, he has falsely claimed that photos of the Harris-Walz rally at Detroit Metro Airport in Michigan last Wednesday were “fake” and artificial intelligence-generated.
Around 15,000 people gathered in front of Air Force Two on the tarmac, with photos, videos and live footage showing the huge crowd of supporters.
In a wild social media rant on Sunday, the former president claimed the crowd that showed up in support of Harris and her vice presidential pick Tim Walz “didn’t exist” and “nobody was there” – while wildly calling for his rival’s disqualification from the presidential race.
“Look, we caught her with a fake ‘crowd.’ There was nobody there!,” Trump wrote alongside a photograph of the Michigan rally in a Truth Social post on Sunday evening.
In another, Trump claimed that Harris’ campaign team had used AI to make the crowd appear larger than it actually was.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!
“She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.”
Trump continued: “She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches.”
The crowd size, however, was very real, with pictures from rallygoers and journalists, testimony from dozens of politicians, live-streamed video and even the photographer who took the picture in question all debunking Trump’s latest falsehood.
Getty images’ Andrew Harnik, a photographer who captured the rally, said there was no evidence that the photos had been doctored in anyway.
“It was a large crowd, and the pictures that I took that are on the Getty website speak to that,” Harnik told The Daily Beast.
Winston AI Detector determined the image to be “96 percent human,” essentially eradicating the possibility that AI was used to enhance the photo, according to fact checking website Snopes.
“The crowd did in fact exist and the rally was attended by thousands of people,” Spectrum News determined in a separate analysis debunking the allegations.
Harris’s campaign team was quick to quash Trump’s conspiracy theorist claims.
“This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” KamalaHQ wrote on X with a screenshot resharing Trump’s Truth Social Post.
Democratic California Representative Ted Lieu described Trump as a fantasist over his comments, saying the former president “is not suited for office in any way whatsoever”.
Trump is “really going bonkers off the edge into dementia land,” he told MSNBC on Sunday.
Chair of the Michigan Democratic Party Lavora Barnes also teased on X that the “AI crowd was really loud, my ears just stopped ringing from their imaginary cheering”.
Trump’s fresh obsession with crowd size come just days after he wildly claimed at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago that his rally before the Capitol riot had pulled in a crowd as big as Martin Luther King Jr during his 1963 March on Washington.
MLK Jr drew in an estimated 250,000 people where he delivered his “I have a dream” speech, dwarfing the former president’s crowd of approximately 53,000 people.
Trump’s obsession with Harris’s crowd sizes comes as she continues to see mounting enthusiasm with sold out rallies, record-breaking donations and increased favorability in the polls since she entered the race for the White House last month.
Harris packed out an 8,000-capacity arena in Atlanta, Georgia, during her first campaign rally last month.
And a crowd of 14,000 raucous Democrats arrived in Philadelphia last Tuesday to see the firts rally with Walz on the Democratic party ticket.
A new poll from The New York Times shows Harris leading Trump by four points – 50 per cent to 46 per cent – in three critical battleground states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The Independent has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.
