(CNN)There's perhaps no more consistent thread in Donald Trump's thinking (and self-image) than the crowds he draws.
The day after his inauguration, he pushed then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer to tell the press corps that the crowd on hand was historic.
"This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration -- period -- both in person and around the globe," Spicer said. "These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong." (He has since said he regrets making that ridiculous claim.)
Throughout his presidency, Trump would talk about his ability to draw big crowds -- often at deeply inappropriate times.
While visiting a hospital that was treating victims of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, Trump said this: "I was here three months ago. That place was packed. ... That was some crowd. And we had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto [O'Rourke]. Beto had like 400 people in a parking lot, they said his crowd was wonderful."
All of which brings me to this past weekend and Trump's speech at the Faith & Freedom Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
He started off by calling the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol a "simple protest that got out of hand." Trump then said "that was the largest crowd that I have ever spoken to ... that was a crowd where there was unbelievable love and patriotism in the air." (He repeated his claim about the crowd being the biggest crowd he had ever spoken to no fewer than three times.)
Trump then -- somehow -- transitioned to talking about the speech he gave on the National Mall on July 4, 2020. And he said this:
"On July 4, I gave a speech two years ago at the mall, and it was the same mall that ... the great Martin Luther King Jr. gave [his speech]. The structure is identical. You have the Washington Monument, you have the wall, you have the Lincoln Monument ... the pools -- everything. And Dr. King gave a speech and it was great. ... They showed the picture and it was massive. ... They said it was a million people. ... Then I gave my speech and they showed the same thing. ... Everything was identical. ... I gave my speech. So his, they said 1 million people. My pictures were exactly the same, but the people were slightly closer together. They were more compact. ... There were more people, they were tighter together if you look at it. ... Dr. Martin Luther King had a million, and that's fine. Donald Trump with more people, had 25,000."
Which would be nuts -- except that this is Donald Trump we are talking about here. A man who favorably compared himself to, among others, Abraham Lincoln.
Put aside then, for a moment, the utter craziness of comparing any speech to one of the most iconic addresses in American history and just deal in facts.
According to the National Archives, more than 250,000 demonstrators attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that King spoke at in 1963. The crowd for Trump's speech is harder to pin down -- largely because Trump so politicized crowd counts. There's no question there were thousands of people there, but it seem very unlikely that the crowd rivaled that of King. And even less likely that there were 1 million or more people on the mall that July day.
But again, that sort of misses the point. King's "I Have a Dream" speech was a seminal moment in American history -- a soaring piece of rhetoric about what America was and what it could be. Trump's July 4 speech was a steady stream of Covid-19 misinformation mixed with Trump's usual self-congratulatory rhetoric.
They were both speeches, sure. But that's like saying Steph Curry and I are roughly equal because we both play basketball.
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June 20, 2022 at 10:22PM
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Donald Trump just compared his crowds to MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech - CNN
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