It only took a day for Donald Trump to demonstrate that his presidency would be all about him.
On January 21, 2017, with Washington still shaking off its inaugural ball hangover, Trump's new White House press secretary Sean Spicer stormed into the briefing room and vowed to hold the press "accountable." In an extraordinary tantrum, Spicer insisted that Trump had the biggest inaugural crowd ever and said any suggestion otherwise was "shameful and wrong." Spicer was no doubt acting on the orders of his boss after media organizations featured photos that showed Barack Obama had a far larger throng in his first inauguration in 2009.
At the time, this seemed bizarre. But it soon became clear it was a harbinger of an administration that trashed the truth, reinvented reality and was often devoted to serving Trump's need for adulation rather than the national interest.
The former president has long been obsessed by crowd sizes. And he has held events with massive turnout during his three presidential campaigns. But his boasts that no politician has ever attracted more supporters are not true. Obama, for instance, held vast outdoor rallies in 2008 — several times approaching 100,000 people. He got double that at the height of "hope and change" mania in Berlin during a European trip that year.
Crowd sizes don't necessarily dictate how an election will turn out. In 2012, many Republicans saw the size of Mitt Romney's crowds in the final weeks as a sign that he'd beat Obama. Wrong. Aides to John Kerry fell for a similar trap in 2004 when the Democratic nominee got bigger crowds than President George W. Bush but still lost.
But it's better to get big crowds than the small, low-energy gatherings that President Joe Biden typically drew. And there's nothing like a huge cheering horde to leave an impression that a campaign is rising.
This is why Trump is back fixating about crowds. The former president sat at home last week watching the new Democratic nominee Kamala Harris fill vast indoor arenas in key swing states and reacted with fury, betraying insecurities about an election he'd already thought he'd won.
Last week, Trump absurdly insisted that the crowd that turned up to this rally in Washington before the mob assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was bigger than million strong turnout for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech on the National Mall in 1963. It was an odd comparison, since one event was about perfecting democracy and the other was about trying to destroy it. Then, over the weekend, the ex-president spread false right-wing conspiracy theories that Harris had used AI to doctor a photo of her crowd at an airport rally near Detroit. He demanded she be "disqualified" over the "fake crowd picture," claiming it was election interference. This is rather rich given his two indictments over attempts to steal the 2020 election.
But Trump's return to one of his most extreme obsessions makes one thing crystal clear — he's rattled by the rise of Harris and doesn't know how to handle her.
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