Donald Trump doesn’t seem very happy about the enthusiasm and media coverage Kamala Harris has received this week after announcing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate.
In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump complained about the coverage of crowds at Harris’ rallies in Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, which appear to have vastly outnumbered his and even inspired comparisons to Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential run.
“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was – And she pays for her ‘Crowd,‘” Trump said on Thursday, falsely accusing Harris’ campaign of paying attendees to show up to the events.
“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!” he added.
On Wednesday night, Harris and Walz drew a crowd of 15,000 people in Detroit, the campaign’s largest rally to date. Organizers of the event moved it to an airport hangar because of the large number of requests for tickets ― nearly 50,000.
The Democratic running mates arrived at the rally aboard Air Force Two, the vice president’s plane, in a dramatic entrance reminiscent of those Trump staged in airplane hangars during his winning 2016 presidential campaign.
Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu via Getty Images
In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, earlier in the day, Harris and Walz drew over 10,000 attendees at another rally that signaled surging enthusiasm for their White House bid. Long lines of cars and people stretched for miles before the event was scheduled to begin.
And in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris’ first joint event with Walz since announcing the Minnesota governor as her running mate, the campaign packed an arena with 10,000 people ― the same venue where Trump held a rally only days earlier.
However, the former president didn’t appear to have drawn as many attendees as Harris. He complained about empty seats and baselessly accused Georgia State University of blocking “thousands of people” from the venue.
“The school administration stopped us from getting another 500, 600 even a thousand people in,” Trump told his supporters over the weekend. “Thousands of people were told no. And that was OK, but we could have fit another 600 people.”
According to The Washington Post, Trump has grown “increasingly upset” about the state of the race and having to face off against Harris instead of President Joe Biden, who dropped out last month after facing pressure within his party to pass the baton to a younger standard-bearer. Polls have shown Harris surging and her fundraising outpacing that of her GOP rival.
“It’s unfair that I beat [Biden] and now I have to beat her, too,” Trump told an ally in a phone call last weekend, according to the Post.
Trump and his GOP allies have sought to wrest control of the news cycle with ugly attacks on Harris’ race and gender, including questioning her ethnicity and even recycling the same false birther conspiracy theory Trump promoted against Obama and other rivals. Nothing has seemed to stick so far.
On Thursday, Trump announced he would be holding a press conference at his Florida resort, a sign of his desperation to take the cameras off Harris, according to his former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham.