Trump, the leading Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election, has repeatedly boasted about his support and the size of his crowds since launching his political career. While his events are often filled with dedicated supporters, photos and video of some rallies have suggested that they are not always at capacity.
Former President Donald Trump is lashing out over "fake news" reports of under-attended rallies, while claiming that his political events "never have empty seats."
Trump, the leading Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election, has repeatedly boasted about his support and the size of his crowds since launching his political career. While his events are often filled with dedicated supporters, photos and video of some rallies have suggested that they are not always at capacity.
The former president blasted the media for publishing photos of empty seats, insisting that "thousands of people get sent away" from every Trump rally in a Truth Social post on Wednesday. He argued that images appearing to suggest otherwise were of "once fully occupied areas and seats" that had been cleared out due to supporters rushing the stage at the beginning of his rallies.
Trump, who said earlier this month that a rally in Florida was attended by several times more people than the venue was capable of holding, urged the media to "get on board" with his claims about crowd size or risk "going out of business" due to a "lack of credibility."...
...During a rally in Hialeah, Florida, on November 8, the former president appeared to artificially inflate the crowd size by claiming that he was "standing in front of tens of thousands" of supporters. However, the venue only has a capacity of around 5,200 people, according to the Associated Press (AP).
Videos of the rally shared on X, formerly Twitter, show empty bleacher seats, although some guests can be seen standing behind a section of seats closer to the stage. An account associated with a group supporting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 GOP presidential primary also claimed that "people are streaming out of Trump's BORING event while he is still speaking."
A video of a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, shared by NBC News correspondent Gabe Gutierrez in July, shows large sections of empty seats while Trump is heard delivering his speech. There is no evidence that attendees who had been in the empty areas moved closer to the former president, with no sign of unseated people gathered near the stage....
