Donald Trump has continued his ploy of inflating the crowd size at one of his public events by suggesting his weekend rally in Texas had thousands more in attendance than appeared to show up.
Following his first major public 2024 campaign rally in Waco on Saturday, Trump told the press pack on board his private plane that there were more than 25,000 people watching. He also mocked potential 2024 GOP candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' apparent inability to draw such a crowd.
"If Ronald Reagan came back from the dead, which would be very nice, actually, or a popular politician, you would have 300 to 400 people," Trump said, reported by Right Side Broadcasting. "Ron DeSanctimonious had 179. So far, that's been his biggest crowd in Iowa–he had 179 people."
Trump also made a similar claim on during an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, which was broadcast on Monday.
"Last night, I had a rally with tens of thousands of people," Trump said. "The press admitted there were at least 25 or 30,000 people. That means you can double it at least."
With regards to the size of Trump's Waco rally, local press reports that the true figure of the crowd was around 15,000 to 18,000, rather than around 25,000 to 60,000, as the former president suggested.
Aerial photos from the scene also suggest that Trump has once again exaggerated the crowd size at one of his rallies as he launches his latest presidential campaign.
View of Trump rally crowd in Waco, Texas, from the air as Trump Force One comes in to land pic.twitter.com/kZL6SGKBoC
— Rob Crilly (@robcrilly) March 25, 2023
During his presidency, Trump frequently made references to crowd sizes at his public events. He still mocks people such as President Joe Biden and DeSantis for not being as big a draw as he is in terms of crowd sizes.
Trump said that his 2017 inauguration had the highest-ever attendance for such an event, despite photos proving otherwise. He frequently inflated the size of his crowds of his political rallies by sometimes tens of thousands of people.
Trump has even boasted that the number of his supporters who saw his speech at the Ellipse in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, before the Capitol riot, was the "largest crowd I've ever spoken to before." He laments that the press do not talk about this.
It is unclear where Trump got the 179 figure for a DeSantis event in Iowa. The Florida governor gave a speech to Iowa Republicans on March 10 at the Rhythm City Casino Resort in Davenport. The Associated Press reports that this was in front of more than 1,000 people. A similar crowd of several hundred also saw DeSantis speak at an event with a small contingent of GOP lawmakers in Des Moines the same day.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump also mocked DeSantis for the relatively small attendance during the governor's speech to police unions in Staten Island, New York on February 20.
"Big buildup, lots of money spent, yet only 139 people showed up for DeSantis in Staten Island," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump criticized DeSantis for the crowd size, despite it being an invite-only event hosted by the New York State Fraternal Order of Police. It began at 7:30 a.m. in a room that seats up to 140 people only.
The former president later made a similar statement while speaking to a crowd of his supporters on Presidents Day at the Trump 45 Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
"Ron DeSanctimonious had a crowd on Staten Island today: 139 people on Staten Island. We've got a lot of people. We've got 139 times 30," Trump said.
Newsweek has emailed Trump's office for comment.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy ... Read more
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