'Unhappy with the narrative': Trump privately seething about Harris’ crowd sizes

08 August 2024

Since she became the presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has been packing venues with thousands of loud supporters. This has reportedly gotten under the skin of former President Donald Trump.

Rolling Stone reporters Ryan Bort and Asawin Suebsaeng on Thursday spoke with an unnamed "Republican source who's spoken to the former president in recent days" who confided that Trump is quietly boiling over with anger about how Harris has commanded the news cycle over the last two weeks. Specifically, the source said Trump is "unhappy with the narrative" that Harris is attracting larger crowds to her rallies than the ex-president. Trump essentially said as much in a recent post to his Truth Social page.

"If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes 'crazy,' and talks about how 'big' it was - And she pays for her 'Crowd.' When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE," Trump wrote. "The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!"

Harris and Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz — whom the vice president announced as her running mate on Tuesday – have been barnstorming across the Midwest since Walz joined the ticket. Harris spoke to a crowd of thousands at a basketball arena in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and even posted a side-by-side comparison of crowd sizes on her campaign's Truth Social (which Trump owns) account on Tuesday night. The top photo of Harris' rally shows the stadium packed to the rafters, while the photo of Trump's crowd size shows the attendees are mostly concentrated in the lower bowl.

"Same arena in Philly," the @KamalaHQ account wrote.

Meanwhile, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has been struggling to muster the same enthusiasm during his campaign stops in comparison to the Democratic ticket. On Wednesday, a video of a Vance rally in Macomb County, Michigan — which Trump comfortably won in both 2016 and 2020 — showed there were approximately just as many journalists present as there were supporters. This prompted some to ridicule the GOP vice presidential nominee as "low energy."

Aside from his Thursday press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump has done only eight public events since the late June debate with President Joe Biden. Harris and Walz, in the meantime, have a packed schedule after announcing a seven-state blitz of rallies across the country, including in states deemed safe Republican, like Montana.

Both Harris and Walz have also been outpacing the Republican ticket in fundraising. Last month alone, the Harris campaign announced it brought in $310 million in donations — the bulk of which came in the last week of the month after Biden announced he was exiting the race and endorsing the vice president. Trump and Vance raised $139 million, which NPR noted came in a month in which the former president was officially nominated at the Republican National Convention and survived an assassination attempt.

After announcing Walz, the vice president has raised roughly $41 million more this week, with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago still to come later this month. Quartz noted that throughout Walz's six terms in Congress, he raised a total of $11.3 million over that 12-year period.

Click here to read Rolling Stone's report in its entirety (subscription required).

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