Donald Trump has shifted his attention to the size of Vice President Kamala Harris’s crowds, creating a stir with his latest claims. Since Harris joined the Democratic presidential race, Trump has fixated on the number of people attending her events, sparking a new controversy.
Trump has always been obsessed with crowd sizes. He exaggerated the number of attendees at his 2017 inauguration and recently claimed that his January 6, 2021 rally was larger than Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Now, he’s turned his focus on Harris’s rally at Detroit Metro Airport in Michigan.
On August 7, 2024, approximately 15,000 people gathered at the airport to support Harris and her vice presidential pick, Tim Walz. The event was widely covered with photos, videos, and live footage clearly showing the large turnout. Despite this, Trump has made some extraordinary claims.
In a social media rant on Sunday, Trump accused Harris’s campaign of staging the crowd using fake images. He suggested that the photos of the rally were “fake” and created by artificial intelligence (AI). Trump posted on Truth Social, “Look, we caught her with a fake ‘crowd.’ There was nobody there!” He went further, alleging that the campaign used AI to artificially inflate the appearance of the crowd. “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 also claimed that a maintenance worker at the airport had discovered the fake crowd picture by noticing reflections on the Vice Presidential plane. He wrote, “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.”
However, these claims have been debunked. Andrew Harnik, a Getty Images photographer who captured the rally, confirmed that the images were not doctored. “It was a large crowd, and the pictures that I took are on the Getty website speak to that,” Harnik told The Daily Beast.
Fact-checking website Snopes used Winston AI Detector, which found the image to be “96 per cent human,” essentially ruling out any AI manipulation.
Harris’s campaign quickly addressed Trump’s conspiracy theories. On X, formerly known as Twitter, they shared the photo from the rally and wrote, “This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan.”
Democratic Representative Ted Lieu criticized Trump’s statements, describing them as fantasies. “He’s really going bonkers off the edge into dementia land,” Lieu said in an MSNBC interview. He added that Trump’s comments reflect a disconnect from reality and unfitness for office.
