Donald Trump has always been fixated on crowd size, to the point that it’s one of the defining features of his approach to politics. There’s undoubtedly some psychology that might be unpacked here; his interest in the audience is certainly downstream from his past celebrity and intermingled with his focus on television ratings and opinion polls (when favorable). But it is what it is and, for Trump, it is a metric of incomprehensible importance.
One thing about crowds, though, is that attendance depends on there being something to attend. And in 2024, Trump is giving his supporters fewer opportunities to form a crowd.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer reported on Trump’s grumbling frustration with Vice President Kamala Harris’s energetic campaign. Among the complaints? “Trump has also repeatedly raised the large crowds that Harris is getting compared with [President Joe] Biden,” Dawsey and Scherer report.
Sure enough, on Thursday morning, Trump complained about coverage of Harris’s audiences on social media.
“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was,” he wrote, “And she pays for her “Crowd.” When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”
There is no evidence that Harris pays people to attend her rallies or needs to. When Trump launched his campaign in 2015, people were paid to attend and to fill out the audience.
But again, Trump is holding far fewer rallies than he did in 2016 and has held far fewer public appearances than he did in 2020, the two previous times he sought the presidency.
A review of Trump’s activities in July and August of those previous years shows the difference. From July 1 to Aug. 10, 2016, Trump held 22 rallies, including six days on which he held multiple rallies. Over the rest of August, he added 15 more rallies. This year, he’s held seven rallies with another scheduled for Friday in Montana.
In 2020, the landscape was different for two reasons: the restrictions that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic and the fact that Trump was president. He held public events on nearly every day in July and August of that year, including a number of rallies held by conference call. (You may recall that Trump even tried to trademark the term “telerally.”) There were 13 rallies over those two months that year, about half of which were in person.
In Trump’s stead, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has been holding news events in places where Harris is speaking at campaign events. On Thursday morning, Trump also announced that he’d be holding a news conference in the afternoon — albeit from his home at Mar-a-Lago. (Thursday is the second anniversary of the FBI’s search of that property.) The attendees at the news conference will presumably be limited to the aforementioned “enemies of the people.”
There’s plenty of time for Trump to gear his campaign back up, certainly, and it’s likely that he will. But it’s silly to fret about Harris drawing more support when Trump isn’t holding many events to which supporters can be drawn.