No human being should care as much about crowd sizes as Donald Trump, who has spent years obsessing over how many people show up to hear him talk. Lately, however, it’s been worse — not just because of the former president’s narcissism, but also because some impressive audiences have started showing up to Kamala Harris’ rallies.
It’s apparently driving the Republican nominee a little batty.
At his long, rambling Mar-a-Lago news conference, for example, after a reporter brought up the Democrat’s crowds, a visibly displeased Trump said his crowds are up to “30 times” larger than Harris’. The arithmetic reinforced just how unintentionally amusing the misplaced boast was: The public is apparently supposed to believe that if 10,000 people show up for a Harris event, it might seem impressive, but not when compared with the 300,000 imaginary people who’ve shown up for a Trump event.
Of particular interest to the GOP candidate, however, was the crowd on hand to hear his Jan. 6 lies ahead of the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
After going on and on for a while about how impressed he was with his Jan. 6 audience — he has insisted repeatedly in recent years that the crowd size that day is what really matters — Trump apparently thought it’d be a good idea to draw a comparison to a major historical event.
“If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything — same number of people. If not, we had more,” the former president said at his news conference. “And they said he had a million people but I had 25,000 people.” He chuckled. “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything’s the same because it was — the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to, from Lincoln to Washington, and you look at it and you look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd — we actually had more people.”
None of this was even remotely true. Trump apparently didn’t care.
What’s more, as part of the same set of remarks, the former president added: “Nobody was killed on Jan. 6.” That wasn’t true, either.
But perhaps the most striking lie was Trump’s comments on the transfer of power. The Associated Press reported:
Trump was asked about Biden’s comments in a CBS interview that he was “not confident” there would be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump were to lose. “He should have brought this up at the debate if he had a problem. Of course there’ll be a peaceful transfer, and there was last time.”
It’d be great if that were true. It wasn’t. Not only did an insurrectionist mob, fueled by Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, attack the Capitol two weeks before Inauguration Day, but as the defeated Republican grudgingly exited the White House — refusing to attend his successor’s swearing-in — military personnel and police officers patrolled the streets of Washington, fearing additional potential violence from Trump’s followers. I’m reminded of remarks former Rep. Liz Cheney delivered in June 2022, as the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee began its public hearings, and the Wyoming Republican made an appeal to the public. “Remember the men and women who have fought and died so that we can live under the rule of law, not the rule of men,” Cheney said. “I ask you to think of the scene in our Capitol rotunda on the night of Jan. 6. There, in, a sacred space in our constitutional republic, the place where our presidents lie in state, watched over by statues of Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant, Eisenhower, Ford and Reagan, against every wall that night encircling the room, there were SWAT teams, men and women in tactical gear with long guns deployed inside our Capitol building. “There in the rotunda, these brave men and women rested beneath paintings depicting the earliest scenes of our Republic, including one painted in 1824 depicting George Washington resigning his commission, voluntarily relinquishing power, handing control of the Continental Army back to Congress. With this noble act, Washington set the indispensable example of the peaceful transfer of power. What President Reagan called, ‘nothing less than a miracle.’ The sacred obligation to defend this peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president — except one.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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