Donald Trump has the world convinced he’s obsessed with the size of things.
In particular, the 79-year-old Republican often stretches the truth to prove he knows how to draw the largest crowds.
Fact-checkers have tracked Trump’s false or misleading statements, which supposedly totaled over 30,000 during his first term.
That number could be larger this current term due to the president’s gross claims about Black historical figures.
During a White House press conference on June 3, Trump gave the press an update on renovations for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.
His remarks included a common tangent that led him to push another false claim about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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The internet is having a meltdown after he falsely claimed that his 2016 inauguration drew a larger audience than another historic event.
“That’s where Martin Luther King made his great speech with a million people,” Trump told the reporters assembled in the Oval Office, referring to the Lincoln Memorial.
But Trump’s explanation was simple: his people were crammed so close together that cameras made the crowd look like a mere 25,000 — but the real number, he claimed, was well over a million.
He resumed, “I had the same amount of people. Actually, I had a little bit tighter. It was a little bit tighter. They said he had a million people, and I had 25,000 people.”
The president was not very specific about where he got those numbers, which could mean he made them up, or confused different events.
Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 reportedly drew around 300,000 to 600,000 people, which would be third of the 1.8 million who attended President Barack Obama’s inaugural address in 2009.
MLK Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
An estimated 250,000 people showed up at the March on Washington.
The one-day demonstration was organized as a protest against racial and economic discrimination.
Trump regularly repeats the comparison of his event to MLK Jr.’s crowd size.
And every time it stirs up emotional reactions from critics accusing him of disrespecting a civil rights legend.
Trump: “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech and you look at ours, same real estate. You look at the picture of his crowd versus my crowd, we had more people.”
— Andrew—#IAmTheResistance (@AmoneyResists) August 8, 2024
Here’s aerial shots of MLK’s March on Washington vs. Trump’s inauguration: pic.twitter.com/Hvog9EgNxP
“So delusional,” one Threads user posted about the head of the nation’s executive branch. A second person called Trump an “idiot,’’ while another detractor declared, “He’s so sick.”
The president also caught heat when someone on Threads wrote, “He doesn’t qualify to speak the name of Dr. MLK. He is an incoherent, despicable, degenerate of a human.”
Another said, “Wait what…. A million is less than 25,000….”
Over on Instagram, someone suggested that race played a part in Trump’s need to compare himself to Obama and King, by writing, “Successful Black men live rent-free in his head.”
“It may not always be about how many people were present to listen to a speech, but more about the content of the speech. I doubt Trump ever had anything worth remembering compared to MLK,” read another critical Instagram comment.
Additionally, one commenter on the app questioned Trump’s mental state, proclaiming, “There is something very wrong psychologically there.” Similarly, another Instagram user exclaimed, “Brain is gone!”
Trump’s crowd size fixation ignited one of the earliest scandals of his first term, when then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer falsely claimed that the 2017 inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”
Side-by-side photos of Obama, 64, speaking to a massive inauguration audience and his successor standing before a noticeably smaller one, became viral memes in the early days of Trump 1.0, which purportedly angered the then-newly inaugurated POTUS.
Spicer, 54, eventually admitted wanting a “do-over on that day,” but his outlandish defense of his boss came off as an extension of Trump’s egocentric tendencies, which many observers believed were fueled by jealousy of his predecessor.
Those wild fabrications disguised as so-called “alternative facts” continued over the next decade, including the president comparing the March on Washington to the Trump-backed “Save America” rally at The Ellipse in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Nobody spoke to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said in an August 2024 speech, before adding, “We actually had more people. They said I had 25,000, and he had a million people, and I’m OK with it, because I liked Dr. Martin Luther King.”
