(WASHINGTON) — In a social media post on Sunday, former President Donald Trump falsely accused Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign of using artificial intelligence to fabricate crowds a campaign rally in Michigan last week.
The picture referenced by Trump shows a large crowd waiting to see Harris speak at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Aug. 7
A Harris campaign official told ABC News that the photo Trump called into question was taken by a Harris campaign staffer and that it was “not modified by AI in any way.”
“The photo in question was taken by a staffer on their iPhone 12 Pro at 6:28PM on August 7, at the rally at the Detroit Airport,” the campaign official told ABC News in a statement.
ABC News obtained the original image and was able to verify the metadata matched with the timing of the event.
Harris’ Aug. 7 rally in Detroit, Michigan, was the third event of her battleground blitz since Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz joined the ticket. The campaign touts that more than 15,000 people attended the rally.
By comparison, the first public appearance that Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance shared had more than 12,000 spectators in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump’s campaign said.
The Harris campaign said there were more than 10,000 supporters at each stop on Harris and Walz’s battleground state blitz last week.
The Harris campaign also disputed Trump’s accusations in multiple social media posts and attacked Trump for not campaigning in a swing state as the former president spent the weekend campaigning and fundraising in Western states.
In recent weeks, Trump has continued to make baseless claims that the Harris campaign pays for her crowd as his Democratic rival gains momentum with large-scale rallies.
The former president has long boasted about his crowd size. In a news conference last week, Trump claimed that “nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.”
He grew increasingly angry when asked about Harris’ crowd size — comparing them to his own.
“Oh, give me a break,” Trump replied to the reporter.
“I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size. And they never say the crowd was big. That’s why I’m always saying, turn around the cameras,” Trump said.
Trump then went on to compare the crowd that gathered for his speech in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, to Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s 1963 March on Washington, which the civil rights leader delivered to an estimated crowd of 200,000 people, according to the U.S. Census.
“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,” Trump said.
Trump’s next rally is on Wednesday at Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina, which has a maximum capacity of 7,200 people; however, Trump’s venues often vary in size. After that, he is set to have a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, at Mohegan Arena at Casey Plaza — a venue that holds nearly 10,000 people.
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