Trump falsely accuses Harris campaign of fabricated AI crowd photos

Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed on social media Sunday that a crowd at a Michigan rally for Vice President Kamala Harris last week “DIDN’T EXIST,” “nobody was there” and that photos of the event were fabricated by artificial intelligence. But Trump’s repeating of the false claims about the crowd size and photos, with multiple posts on his Truth Social platform, is a notable escalation. 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!” the Republican nominee for president wrote on social media. There is also no evidence that Harris, or Democrats more broadly, have cheated to win elections, despite Trump’s repeated false allegations that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” David Plouffe, a senior adviser for Kamala Harris for President, expressed concern on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, about Trump’s comments. “The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades.” The event last week at an airport hangar in Detroit was live-streamed, widely attended by the media including The Washington Post, and many attendees posted their own pictures and video showing a packed venue. pic.twitter.com/7OvtfpObgl — Mallory McMorrow (@MalloryMcMorrow) August 11, 2024 On Sunday, the Harris campaign rejected Trump’s comments, writing on the social media site X, “This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan.” Trump, the GOP nominee for president, for years has been focused on crowd size as a metric of success. He has repeatedly taken to social media to boast about how the size of crowd he could draw and last week asserted at a news conference that “nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.” Trump has previously claimed that the audience for a speech he gave in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, eclipsed the numbers who attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech despite photographic evidence that it did not. The Washington Post Fact Checker team in January 2021 noted that it had logged “30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.” Trump’s focus on crowd size also has become something that the Harris campaign has used to poke fun at Trump about — while at the same time bragging about their own crowds. Advertisement Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz at a Friday night rally with Harris, looking at an audience in Arizona that Democrats estimated at more than 15,000, quipped, “It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything.” On Sunday afternoon, the Harris campaign released a statement describing a crowd of “more than 12,000 Nevadans” at a rally over the weekend — “one of the largest political rallies in modern Nevada political history” — and then described previous audiences as including “14,000+ in Philadelphia, 12,000+ in Eau Claire, and 15,000+ in both Detroit and Arizona.” And at a fundraising event in San Francisco on Sunday, Harris appeared to address Trump’s social media accusations indirectly. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/11/trump-falsely-accuses-harris-campaign-fabricated-ai-crowd-photos/