There was no official tally of the size of Kamala Harris’ audience for her closing message at the Ellipse, but as the Democratic vice president prepared to take the stage in Washington, her communications director told MSNBC that there were 75,000 people on hand — an enormous number of attendees for a campaign speech.

If that total is correct, and it largely has been uncontested, it would suggest Harris’ crowd at the Ellipse was far larger than the 53,000 people who attended Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 speech at the same location nearly four years earlier.

Around the same time, the former Republican president held an event in Pennsylvania, where he commented on Harris’ crowd.

“They’re busing people because they couldn’t get anybody to show up for her tonight,” Trump said, referring to Harris and her team. The GOP candidate added, “She can’t get anybody.”

Obviously, the idea that the Democratic candidate “can’t get anybody” is utterly bonkers. Not only did tens of thousands of people assemble at the Ellipse, but days earlier, tens of thousands of people attended a Harris rally in Houston.

The more interesting part of Trump’s line, however, was the idea that the Democratic campaign has been reduced to “busing people because they couldn’t get anybody to show up for her.” He said the same thing at an event last week, telling a Michigan audience, “You ever see Kamala’s crowds? They put like 10 people, they bus them in. They take a bus, and they pay people. It’s true. They pay people. They don’t get people.”

In fact, the former president has been pushing this same line, almost word for word, since early September — when he first started noticing the big and excited crowds Harris was generating.

In August, Trump went so far as to claim that people were using “artificial intelligence” to make it appear as if sizable crowds were showing up for the vice president’s campaign events. He added at the time that images showing her audiences were “fake.”

What I find amazing about all of this is how truly pitiful it is. Trump’s ego can’t handle the idea that his opponent has enthusiastic supporters, so he apparently makes himself feel better with a conspiracy theory of sorts: Harris and her team must be paying fake supporters to attend her events, because the alternative is that many Americans actually like her and want her to win.

What’s more, this isn’t unique to the 2024 election. In early June 2016, when the then-candidate inspired protests, Trump assumed that the people involved couldn’t possibly dislike him. They were, the Republican said at the time, “paid agitators.”

After the GOP candidate prevailed on Election Day 2016, there was related anti-Trump activism. Those involved, he said in November 2016, were “paid protesters.”

Months later, after the Republican’s inauguration, the activism continued. Trump assured the public once more that these Americans deserved to be ignored — because he assumed they were “paid protesters.”

The following year, Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination inspired another round of progressive activism. The protesters, Trump insisted, were “paid professionals.”

That was in October 2018. In October 2024, he’s at it again, assuming that the Harris campaign is paying people to show up for her events.

The problem isn’t just that Trump sees Americans he disagrees with as “the enemy within,” the problem is made worse by the fact that he often sees Americans he disagrees with as an impossibility that can only be explained through corrupt schemes that only exist in his mind.