Former President Donald Trump has long been obsessed with numbers that signal dominance, like net worth, television ratings, poll results and the attendance figures at his political rallies.

In 2016, Trump pointed to the outsized attendance at his campaign stops to dispute the polls that showed Hillary Clinton leading him on the eve of the election. In 2017, he spent his first full day in office claiming his inauguration crowd was larger than that of former President Barack Obama. (It wasn’t.)

Now Trump is again obsessing over crowd size, inflating the number of supporters at his rallies while questioning the drawing power of his opponents, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate.

Trump falsely claims Harris used AI to fake crowd image

Over the weekend, Trump endorsed a fringe conspiracy theory that images of the crowd at a rally for Harris and Walz last week at Detroit’s Metropolitan Wayne County Airport — estimated to be 15,000 people, according to their campaign — were somehow manipulated.

“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 wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Never mind that the rally was attended by news organizations — like the New York Times and Washington Post, that could make their own estimates — and broadcast live on C-SPAN.

“There was nobody there, later confirmed by the...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi5wFBVV95cUxOOW94a2pVRXc4UmZOZFRnZm41...