Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are drawing huge crowds at their rallies, but a sour Donald Trump, who has long boasted about his popularity, is falsely alleging that such appearances are not real but a creation of artificial intelligence. While Trump's inaccurate claims have gained traction among supporters on social media, crticis are saying that they reek of desperation.
"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 on Truth Social, referring to a crowd of supporters waiting for Harris and Walz to disembark from a plane in Detroit, before calling for Harris to be disqualified for "election interference."
Trump then shared an image of the crowd, saying it was AI-generated and "proof" of Harris' cheating. However, a Harris campaign official confirmed to ABC News that the photo was taken by a staffer on their iPhone 12 Pro. Other photos and videos of the rally verified by ABC show similar crowd sizes at the event, according to a post by ABC News' Emmanuelle Saliba. The photo shared by Trump on Truth Social appears to be the same but in a different color tone.
David Plouffe, Harris' senior campaign advisor, took Trump to task on X, writing: "These are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet. The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades."
Trump likes to crow over his crowd sizes. On Thursday, he falsely claimed that he drew a bigger following on January 6, 2021, than Martin Luther King Jr. did in 1963. Though Trump has mustered huge crowds before, often the receipts don't match his words, which provokes him into lashing out. In recent weeks, the enthusiasm at Harris-Walz rallies compared to some of his less-well-attended events has apparently confounded the former president, who is not only doubling down on his crowd size contest but also relying on increasingly risky and baseless attacks against this opponent, including those targeting Harris on her mixed-race ancestry.
To some observers, this is part of an unraveling that is fast revealing the depths of Trump's psychological problems and disconnect from reality. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said that Trump is "really going bonkers off the edge into dementia land" for "fantasizing that all these rallies are not real."
"As I've been yammering about for five or six years now, he's a deeply unwell man," said George Conway, a Trump critic and former husband of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, in response to Trump's Truth Social post about crowd size. "He is a deeply psychologically disturbed individual. If he were a member of your family, you'd be ... staging an intervention and taking him into a psychiatric hospital."
At the end of his Truth Social post, Trump spun a new angle on his oft-repeated line that Democrats are "stealing" elections, claiming that their fake AI rallies mirror their "cheating" at the ballot box and that Harris should be disqualified from running "because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE."
Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes warned that this could be a preview of future efforts to question the legitimacy of the election before it even takes place.
"This is pre-election denialism by Donald Trump," Sykes said. "It's no mystery, Donald Trump is never going to graciously concede defeat in this election. He's already laying the groundwork for what's going to happen after November. I think this is going to be an extraordinarily dangerous period. He has election deniers in key states, his base is psychologically not prepared for him to lose."
