Donald Trump has always inhabited an alternate reality of his own making, bending and twisting the truth for personal and political gain throughout his time in the public spotlight.
Lately, though, the former president’s claims have gotten even more bizarre and outlandish ― a trend that just so happens to coincide with Vice President Kamala Harris’ surge in the polls and heightened enthusiasm among Democrats not seen since the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Over the weekend, Trump said that a huge crowd of 15,000 people gathered to see Harris and her new vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at a Detroit airport hangar last week simply “DIDN’T EXIST.”
“Nobody was there,” Trump claimed Sunday on his social media platform Truth Social, accusing the Harris campaign of using artificial intelligence to fake the image.
Dozens of images and videos posted online by people who attended the event confirmed that there was indeed a large crowd of Harris supporters at her Michigan rally — and that Trump is, once again, lying about something plain as day.
Harris also drew similar attendance at other rallies in the battleground states of Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, underscoring Trump’s political peril just 90 days from the November presidential election.
The GOP nominee, a convicted felon, doesn’t have to worry about just winning; he also has to worry about potentially going to jail if he doesn’t become president again.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, accused Trump of gearing up to deny the 2024 election results. “If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in PA, MI and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent,’” Sanders said in a statement on Tuesday.
Last week, Trump claimed falsely at a press conference that his crowd at the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, rivaled that of Martin Luther King Jr. for his 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech on the National Mall, which vastly outnumbered Trump’s pre-insurrection rally with about 260,000 people.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urged Trump to quit obsessing about crowd sizes and keep his eye on the ball in an interview with Fox News on Monday.
“You’ve got to make this race not on personalities,” McCarthy said. “Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position when it comes to, what did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?”
Trump hasn’t shown an ability to stay focused on GOP talking points despite pleas from many in his party to do so. He’s been far more preoccupied with complaining about President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race after Democrats called for a younger nominee, veering decidedly into conspiratorial theories about the nature of Biden’s exit.
“This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave,” Trump told billionare Elon Musk on Monday. “They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him.”
Trump also baselessly alleged during his press conference last week that Harris “was working with the people that wanted [Biden] out.”
And in what is perhaps the biggest sign of his desperation and anger about having to face Harris in November, Trump fantasized about Biden somehow returning to try and reclaim the presidential nomination during next week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden … CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. “He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”
The chances are zero. Harris has officially been nominated as her party’s standard bearer by 99% of Democratic delegates. Biden endorsed her last month and is reportedly scheduled to deliver a speech on the opening day of the convention.
Even when Trump does home in on Harris, he tends to get into trouble by making comments about her race and gender, eliciting grimaces from elected Republicans. He falsely claimed that Harris only recently identified as Black, and has reportedly referred to her as a “bitch” on several occasions in private (his campaign has denied it).
For weeks, Republicans have urged Trump to stick to hammering Harris on policy, with mixed results.
“This is a perfect person to run against,” McCarthy told Fox on Monday. “You thought John Kerry was a flip-flopper? She is the biggest flip-flop, with the most extreme positions, and you got a short time frame to do it.”
“So don’t sit back, get out there and start making the case and use her own words to do it to her,” he counseled.