On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris‘ campaign shared a video on Truth Social of former President Donald Trump‘s rally in Michigan, showing one crowded section and a larger empty area, mocking the Republican presidential candidate over crowd size.
The post on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, features a split-screen video: the top shows Trump at the rally remarking on the crowd’s size, while the bottom video provides a panoramic view of the venue and attendees.
At his rally Thursday in the key swing state Trump said, “Who else can fill up—only MAGA—but who else fills big places like this at 3 o’clock in the afternoon?” The rally took place at Saginaw Valley State University, almost two hours north of Detroit.
Harris’ campaign shared the video clip of Trump saying that with the caption, “@realDonaldTrump’s lies vs. reality,” with a video of the crowd concentrated in a section less than half the size of the gymnasium. The video pans across the crowd, revealing large empty spaces behind the lighting, security, and audio setup areas.
On the Harris campaign’s X, formerly Twitter, account, the team posted another similar split-screen video of the same rally with the caption: “Trump: No one else can fill this place up (The room is mostly empty).”
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign for comment and confirmation of attendee numbers in an email Friday.
Videos of the venue before Trump’s arrival show hundreds of chairs set up in only half of the gymnasium. Spectrum News DC reporter Taylor Popielarz posted early Thursday morning about Trump supporters lining up behind barricades for the 3 p.m. rally.
Trump and Harris are nearly deadlocked in battleground states, with each holding narrow leads in different states within the margins of error. In Michigan, most aggregate polls show Harris leading by a small margin between 0.2 percent and 2 percent.
In 2020, Biden flipped Saginaw County, which Trump had previously won by a slim margin—49.4 percent of the vote compared to Trump’s 49.1 percent.
Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, rally crowd sizes and attendance have been a point of contention between Trump and Harris, with Trump frequently boasting about his turnout and jabbing Harris’ while Harris counters by highlighting people leaving his rallies or empty sections. In September, The New York Times analyzed six rallies in August, finding that both candidates drew similar audience sizes.
The Times analysis also found that of those six rallies, Trump spoke four times as long as Harris, writing that the longer duration of Trump rallies could contribute to the higher number of people leaving early, as based on photographs.
Some of Trump’s rally size claims have been exaggerated. Earlier this year, Newsweek debunked his assertion that 107,000 people attended his May 2024 rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, estimating the actual number to be around 30,000 to 40,000.
Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek the figure was accurate. “107,000 showed up in Wildwood, including those who couldn’t secure a ticket but came anyways to listen to President Trump outside of the venue space,” he said.
However, a rough map of the site where Trump spoke shows at capacity, without obstructions, only somewhere between 75,000 to 77,000 people would have been able to fit. Although there may have been others outside watching Trump’s speech, it was also reported that thousands of people left during it, so any onlookers would be counted against the lines of people leaving Wildwood.
