At his August 8 press conference, Donald Trump insisted the size of his crowds broke all records:
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump told the audience at a press conference in Mar-a-Lago . . . . “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.”
Which Trump speech at the “same real estate” was not clear; the nearest was his inauguration on January 20, 2017, when he decried “American carnage.”
A federal investigation later revealed that original photos showing a sparse inaugural crowd there were altered to make the crowd seem much larger. NOTE: in the left photo below, the white spaces were all but completely empty:
By contrast, at the historic 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom”, at which Dr. King made his “I Have A Dream” speech, the crowd was huge:
Trump’s often incoherent and untrue remarks in the press event lasted over an hour. Later fact checkers noted numerous falsehoods. This crowd size prevarication is typical, and easily exposed.
When you spend four years writing a book on climate change, you get to know most of the leading players. I have never seen them so dismayed.
