Trump needles tiny DeSantis event after lying about his own rally crowd size
President Donald Trump reposted a photo of Gov. Ron DeSantis' (R-FL) event showing a significantly smaller crowd size than his own rally in South Carolina.
The "retruth" of a fan showed a screen capture of CNN coverage of DeSantis' Nevada rally compared to the Trump fan's photos of the Trump event. The differences were just as evident as the photos of Trump's inauguration matched with former President Barack Obama.
The post comes after Trump falsely claimed that there were 75,000 people at his event. It was a comment quickly fact-checked by the Secret Service, that had another number.
"[Sheriff] Beach said he needed to get an accurate count from the Secret Service before providing a final number. Around 11 a.m., a secret service agent told the News there are 5,000 inside the gate and approximately 10,000 still in line," wrote Bob Montgomery of the Herald Journal.
It isn't the first time. Just a week ago, Trump mocked DeSantis for a small Texas crowd when he went to the Texas-Mexico border.
The size of his crowds and his hands have been among the things that matter the most to Trump. In fact, his first interview after entering the White House focused on his inauguration crowd size. Fox showed empty seats at a New Hampshire rally in 2019 where Trump bragged the room was packed. Trump even complained that he never gets any credit for how big the crowd size was during the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol.
“What Donald Trump has succeeded in doing, in many ways—in his own mind he thinks he’s succeeded tremendously—is to intimidate the press,” said veteran newsman Dan Rather in 2017. “And many of these things are designed to intimidate the press. And this is gut-check time for the press, not to be intimidated.”
