Trump’s Crowd Size Brag Debunked by Embarrassing Video

Donald Trump still hasn’t come to terms with his crowd size.

On Wednesday, the Republican presidential nominee’s appearance in Reading, Pennsylvania, featured a slew of plainly false, misleading claims, including that there were no terrorist attacks during his administration, and that school-aged children were receiving gender-affirming surgery without their parents’ consent.

But one mistruth that Trump couldn’t seem to let go of was the reality of how many people are actually turning out to his repetitive events.

“You know, we get up and we talk, we talk, and I noticed something, somebody was telling me the other day, we do a lot of these beautiful rallies and it’s so great. We never have an empty seat. Never have—Look at them, 100,000 people or more. Never have an empty,” Trump said.

But beyond the scope of the camera, there were empty seats—and a lot of them.

The arena reportedly had a capacity of 7,200 seats, according to The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, but even as Trump began to speak, a couple hundred of them remained empty behind the press risers.

There are a couple hundred empty seats in the back of the stadium behind the press riser as Trump starts his speech here in Reading, Pennsylvania pic.twitter.com/AwknRyQsr2

— Lalee Ibssa (@LaleeIbssa) October 9, 2024

And even in the middle of Trump’s speech, people began to leave, leaving chair gaps directly behind him while on camera.

People walking out in the middle of Trump's rally in Reading, PA pic.twitter.com/0zN572lWrh

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) October 10, 2024

Trump’s low turnout is significant for a candidate who has frequently attacked his political opponents for their inability to draw as many people as he’s historically attracted to his boisterous, sprawling campaign stops.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the relatively lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But whether Trump is on a high or a low note with his supporters, he’s equally likely to stretch the numbers, even going so far in August as to claim that his January 6 crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (photographic evidence proves it wasn’t even close.)