On the same day that many major outlets wrote about Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz packing every seat at their rally in Las Vegas on Saturday — attended by 12,000 people, with thousands more turned away due to lack of space — Donald Trump took to Truth Social to write a series of rants that serve as further proof that all this crowd size chatter is really getting to him.
Falsely accusing Harris of using artificial intelligence (AI) to doctor images of the crowds at her campaign rallies and other public events, Trump crafts a scenario about Harris' "image doctoring," beginning with his theory that her campaign made people appear out of nowhere during a stop in Detroit on Wednesday.
"Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she 'A.I.’d' it, and showed a massive 'crowd' of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!" Trump writes. "She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the 'crowd' looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake 'crowds' at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win elections, by CHEATING - And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!"
In one of Trump's posts on Sunday, he shares an image of a large crowd holding up Harris-Walz banners in front of Harris' plane as "proof" of his accusations. According to Snopes, the "image's origins are unknown," and they "were unable to identify who first posted the image online," but they have not found it to be "fake."
Snopes furthers that many social media users posted the photo shortly after Harris landed for a rally in Detroit on August 7 and that by using the Winston AI Image Detector, the results determined the image was "96% human" — or, that it was "likely photographed by someone and not created using an AI-generation tool." If anything, their findings indicate that "it's possible that lightening, shadows or filtering was digitally manipulated," but not the photo as a whole.
Spectrum News also looked into the validity of the photo shared by Trump, and Harris' rally that day in Detroit, writing:
The crowd did in fact exist and the rally was attended by thousands of people, many of whom posted their own pictures and videos of the event, which was also live streamed by dozens of news channels and attended by a slew of prominent politicians.
The outlet also quotes news source MLive in their dispute of Trump's accusations, writing, “About 15,000 people filled the hangar, the crowd spilling out onto the tarmac.”
As far as the verifiable crowd size at the Harris-Walz rallies, the numerous videos shared from the events are sweepingly authentic and would be very difficult to disprove, including the one below, shared by a user on X from the rally in Vegas this weekend:
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