Former President Donald Trump recently made a bold claim that his January 6 crowd was bigger than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington speech crowd via Mediaite.
The former President has largely been off the campaign trail as Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee for president Kamala Harris has been crisscrossing the country with her new VP pick Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN).
However, Harris has taken criticism from the media for not giving a press conference or interview at that time, which Trump hoped to capitalize on with a “general news conference” at Mar-a-Lago.
On Thursday afternoon, Trump spoke to the reporters for over an hour in a press conference that included a surreal exchange with Maggie Haberman about crowd sizes — which have become a sore spot as Harris has been a much greater draw than expected:
HABERMAN: Mr. President, you were – you just said that it was a peaceful transfer of power last time when you left office. You didn’t (inaudible) …
TRUMP: What – what’s your question?
HABERMAN: My question is you can’t (inaudible) the last time it was a peaceful transfer of power when you left office?
The second one (ph) …
TRUMP: No, I think the people that – if you look at January 6th, which a lot of people aren’t talking about very much, I think those people were treated very harshly when you compare them to other things that took place in this country where a lot of people were killed. Nobody was killed on January 6th.
But I think that the people of January 6th were treated very unfairly. And they – where – they were there to complain not through me. They were there to complain about an election. And, you know, it’s very interesting. The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to, and I said peacefully and patriotically, which nobody wants to say, but I said peacefully and patriotically.
The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. And you’ve seen, Maggie (ph), I was in – at the mall, I was at the Washington Monument, I was at – the whole thing. I had crowds – I don’t know who’s had – ever had a bigger crowd than I have, but I had it many times.
The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken before was that day. And I’ll tell you, it’s very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture of a small number of people relatively going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd.
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, if not – we had more.
And 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 crowd, we actually had more people. They said I had 25,000 and he had a million people, and I’m OK with it cause I liked Dr. Martin Luther King.
Available estimates show Trump’s crowd was about five times smaller than Dr. King’s.
