Donald Trump boasts he had a bigger crowd at the Capitol than Martin Luther King Jr.

King's speech attracted an estimated 250,000 attendees. 


Pop Culture & Art August 09, 2024
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, US, July 31, 2024. PHOTO:REUTERS

Former President Donald Trump is drawing a comparison between himself and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., but only in terms of crowd size.

At a lively press conference on Thursday at his Mar-A-Lago resort, Trump asserted that the crowd he attracted on January 6, 2021, was larger than the one that attended King’s iconic "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

"I'll tell you, it's very hard to find a picture of that crowd,” Trump remarked about the "Stop the Steal" rally.

“You see the picture— a small number of people, relatively, going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd," Trump said of the "Stop the Steal" rally, which he addressed before some rioters breached the Capitol. 

"The biggest crowd I've ever spoken — I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me."

"If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people," Trump said. 

"They said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people. But when you look at the exact same picture, and everything's the same because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to… from Lincoln to Washington. And you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd, my friend, we actually had more people."

King's speech attracted an estimated 250,000 attendees. 

The size of the "Stop the Steal" crowd is less certain, but the Associated Press reported that it had grown to about 10,000 by the afternoon when the riot started.

This isn't the first instance of Trump comparing his crowd sizes to those of MLK Jr., or claiming that the crowd he attracted on January 6 was larger than the one drawn by the civil rights leader.

In June 2022, Trump claimed to a Tennessee audience that his Fourth of July 2020 speech attracted a larger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr.'s. He also asserted that the crowd he spoke to on January 6 was the "largest number of people I've ever spoken to."

 

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