Donald Trump has long boasted about crowd sizes at his rallies, but on Thursday, he used an unexpected comparison in making the case that he is the biggest draw: Martin Luther King Jr.
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said at his news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “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.”
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Trump was responding to a question about whether he thought the end of his term could be considered a peaceful transfer of power, even though it was marked by the Jan. 6 insurrection.
As he has previously, Trump said the people who have been arrested as a result of the storming the Capitol have been treated unfairly. Then, unprompted, he compared his “Stop the Steal” rally before the protesters marched toward the Capitol to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which was held on the National Mall.
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Trump acknowledged that official estimates put his crowd size as smaller than King's, but he said he thought he had "more people."
“But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same — because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington — and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd ... we actually had more people," he said.
The congressional Jan. 6 committee pegged Trump’s crowd at 53,000 people, about one-fifth of the 250,000 who were estimated to be at King’s famous address from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
The NAACP on Thursday posted photos from both days on X and said of Trump's crowd comparison: "Not only is that completely false, but here’s what is more important: MLK’s speech was about democracy. Trump’s was about tearing it down."
Trump advisers and supporters alike have urged him to focus on the record of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, rather than on her race, which he has explicitly done over the past week. That tendency to go off-message, like comparing himself to a civil rights icon, was again on full display Thursday during a wide-ranging hourlong press conference in which he said Harris has been “disrespectful” to Black and Indian American voters by identifying as both.
He again baselessly questioned whether Harris has always identified as Black, called her “barely competent” and attributed her surge in the polls to her gender. At the same time, Trump acknowledged that Harris’ presence at the top of the ticket might hurt him slightly with Black voters, a demographic his campaign has heavily focused on.
“It changes around a little bit. I’m getting other voters,” Trump said from the ornate living room of his Mar-a-Lago club. “Perhaps you know I was doing well with Black voters, and I still am. I seem to be doing very well with Black males.”
“It’s possible that I won’t do as well with Black women, but I do seem to do very well with other segments,” he added.
Trump was quick to focus on the race of Harris, who has a Black father and an Indian mother, when it became clear she was going to replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. That dynamic was highlighted last week by his comments at an event hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists. At the event in Chicago, Trump baselessly suggested that Harris had started identifying as Black only because it was politically advantageous. Later that night at a rally in Pennsylvania, his campaign posted on the arena’s big screen a headline that called Harris the first “Indian American senator.”
Asked why Harris is doing better in most public polling than Biden, Trump said that she “represents certain groups of people” and that the bump can also be attributed, in part, to the fact that “she’s a woman.”
“I see her going way down in polls now that people are finding out that she destroyed San Francisco. She destroyed the state of California with Gov. Gavin Newscum,” Trump said, giving a pejorative nickname to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Harris’ campaign responded to the news conference in a news release with the headline “Donald Trump’s Very Good, Very Normal Press Conference.”
“Split screen: Joy and Freedom vs. Whatever the Hell That Was,” read the release.
The news conference came during a relatively quiet week for Trump, who is holding just one event in Montana — which is heavily Republican-leaning — and has found himself in the rare position of being overshadowed by Harris’ emergence.
“What a stupid question,” Trump said glibly when he was asked about his lighter schedule. “This [is] because I am leading by a lot.”
Trump went on to say that while he is holding fewer events ahead of the Democratic National Convention this month, his campaign is in heavy rotation with TV ads and he is meeting with the media publicly, unlike Harris.
“I’m doing tremendous amounts of taping here. We have commercials that are at a level I don't think that anybody has ever done before,” he said. “I see many of you in the room where I’m speaking to you on phones. I’m speaking to the radio. I’m speaking to televisions. Television is coming here.”
“Excuse me, what are we doing right now?” Trump added, referring to the news conference. “She is not doing any news conferences. ... She’s not smart enough to do a news conference.”
Trump’s advisers have emphasized the importance of contrasting his record with that of Harris, which they have routinely framed as outside the mainstream, criticizing even supporters who sometimes deviate from their desired message.
A senior Trump adviser said: “Sometimes our allies don’t do us any favors, clarifying the differences. So for us as a campaign, we have to make clear where each candidate stands on the issues that matter to the persuadable voters so they have the real information, and we have to spend money across all of the means necessary to do that.”
Asked whether Trump always helps himself by making those contracts clear in his messaging, the adviser dodged:
“I won’t comment on that.”
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:
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NBC News' Phil Helsel contributed.
