Former President Donald Trump’s crowd-size obsession took on a predictable new dimension over the weekend when Trump suggested — without evidence — that Vice President Kamala Harris had faked one of her big crowds using AI.
There is zero basis for claiming that Harris’ crowds last week in Arizona, Michigan or Pennsylvania were anything but real. I would know, I was at one of these events.
HuffPost sent me to Philadelphia last week to cover Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The line to Temple University’s Liacouras Center snaked around several city blocks. People stood outside for hours, enduring the extreme heat and thunderstorms. I spoke to one family, slowly marching toward the entrance, who had stopped by a print shop on their way to the venue to make Harris-Walz T-shirts. I met Zoomers excited to vote for the first time and two “Republicans for Kamala.”
To my eyes (and ringing ears), the arena was nearly full by the time Harris and Walz took the stage that evening. The Harris campaign pegged attendance at over 14,000 people, including overflow.
It’s easy to see what these events are like simply by following the dozens of journalists who frequently cover them. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from baselessly accusing Harris’ campaign of manipulating images while drawing on the same inflammatory language he used to deny the 2020 election results and foment the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“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!” Trump ranted Sunday on Truth Social, falsely suggesting Harris doctored images from a rally at a Detroit airport hangar on Wednesday.
The event was covered extensively in local media, which described the crowd “spilling out onto the tarmac and cheering as Air Force Two arrived.” Turnout was 15,000 people, according to the Harris campaign.
Trump’s AI rant proves to some that Harris’ momentum is getting under Trump’s skin. Harris has been climbing in polls and surpassing the former president in both fundraising and earned media. There’s a palpable excitement building around Harris that’s been missing from Democratic politics. For the first time since probably the 2020 primary, Democrats are just as excited about their candidate as Republicans at MAGA rallies normally are about Trump.
“To have Harris generating all of this enthusiasm has thrown him off,” said Nicholas Grossman, a political science professor at the University of Illinois and a senior editor at Arc Digital. “Politically, that’s a big problem for him. But also, it seems pretty clear psychologically, it’s a big problem for him.”
Trump’s baseless AI attack on Harris also underscores Trump’s increasingly autocratic tendencies, Grossman argued, even as Trump tries to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump term that seeks to consolidate power in the executive branch. Trump is notorious for lying and exaggerating, but lying about something as demonstrably false as Harris doctoring images is a new dangerous front, even for Trump, Grossman said.
“There’s the old lies playing up his popularity, in the same way you’d market products. Then there’s the authoritarian, ‘The truth is whatever we say it is,’ often blatant lying so that everybody unites on a team. It’s playing a different sort of game than what is true and what is false,” Grossman said, adding that AI is a tool uniquely suited to this end: “AI is new enough that it gives people an easy, plausible excuse for being able to question any image.”
Crowds were clearly on Trump’s mind throughout last week. At a solo press conference Thursday, he dusted off a classic riff about the 1963 March on Washington, claiming he drew more people to his 2016 swearing-in than Martin Luther King Jr. did for his “I Have a Dream” speech. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump declared. Trump also falsely claimed he once drew 107,000 people to a New Jersey rally.
Trump complained, too, when he failed to fill every last seat at an Aug. 4 rally at Georgia State University. “Just imagine what they’re going to do on Election Day,” Trump told supporters from the lectern, accusing the university of blocking “thousands” of people from the venue and framing it as part of a left-wing conspiracy to diminish him.
Trump’s strongman persona hinges on the idea that he alone draws the biggest and most enthusiastic crowds. “This is really an important part of Trump’s self-image … and also the campaign,” Grossman said. “The whole idea of they’re low energy and therefore weak, and we’re high energy.”
While Trump was reviving an old playbook, Democrats were debuting a new one, drawing thousands of people to rallies across battleground states after a restless few years under President Joe Biden. As the former presumptive Democratic nominee, Biden didn’t engage in the type of barnstorming that Harris, 20 years younger, has done in just the past three weeks. The sudden and unorthodox change at the top of the ticket makes it that much easier for Trump to convince his followers the reality that’s in front of them isn’t real at all.
In turn, Walz, stumping to one of the largest Democratic crowds of this election cycle last week, identified Trump’s raw nerve and plucked it like a fiddle. “It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” he teased a crowd of 15,000 in Arizona.
