Unhinged: said thousands at a Harris rally covered live by news channels were all faked by AI

Donald Trump's increasingly delusional mental state was bared by his insistence that a crowd of thousands at a Harris rally on August 7, 2024, never existed—that their photos were all faked by AI.

That rally at an airport hangar in Romulus, Michigan, was attended by thousands of people, many of whom posted their own videos and photos of the event, and live-streamed by dozens of news channels.¹ A Detroit News photographer captured images of several prominent politicians speaking and the Detroit Youth Choir performing at that August 7 rally.² One news channel, MLive, estimated the crowd size at 15,000.³

But in a Truth Social post of August 11, Trump claimed that the large crowd at the August 7 Detroit area airport rally "DIDN'T EXIST" and that "she "A.I.'d" it" to show "a massive 'crowd' of so-called followers."⁴ In a follow-up Truth Social post a minute later, Trump claimed, "there was nobody there!"⁵ He extended his series of rants in a third posting a half-hour later.⁶

Trump's starkly delusion denial of the occurrence of Harris' August 7 rally of thousands hearkens back to an audacious lie that he advanced on the very first day of his presidency, January 21, 2021—that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in history.⁷ That claim proved so transparently false⁸ that even his former press secretary, Sean Spicer, who initially defended it, later mocked it in a comedy skit at the Emmy Awards on September 17, 2018.⁹ When asked the next day by the New York Times whether he regretted advancing that false claim about Trump's inaugural crowd size, Spicer replied, "of course I do, absolutely."¹⁰

From these lies about crowd sizes to Trump's fabrication about election fraud in 2020, which he lifted straight from his #1 favorite movie, Trump described events as he wished them to be, not as they happened. The lies he has told since 2015 have been tabulated in the thousands.¹¹

1. The Detroit News, "VP Harris and running mate Walz at Metro Airport," August 7, 2024, https://www.detroitnews.com/picture-gallery/media/photo/2024/08/07/vp-harris-and-running-mate-walz-at-metro-airport/74713793007/; HuffPost, "Trump Falsely Accuses Harris Of Using AI For Massive Crowd At Rally," August 11, 2024, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-falsely-accuses-harris-using-ai-rally_n_66b8f15ee4b0eabd23933d8c; The Washington Post, "Trump's laundry list of increasingly bizarre claims." August 12, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/12/trump-crowd-size-false-claims/; Spectrum News 1, "Trump baselessly charges Harris Michigan rally crowd 'didn't exist,' was generated with AI," August 11, 2024, https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2024/08/11/trump-kamala-harris-michigan-rally-ai; New York Magazine, "Losing to Kamala Harris Makes Trump Crazier, and Being Crazy Makes Him Lose," August 12, 2024, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-kamala-harris-crowd-fake-ai-cheated-crazy-death-spiral.html; HuffPost, "Donald Trump Is Becoming Increasingly Detached From Reality," August 13, 2024, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-detached-from-reality_n_66bb698fe4b04b3eb2527699.
2. The Detroit News, August 7, 2024, op. cit.
3. Spectrum News 1, August 11, 2024, op. cit.
4. Spectrum News 1, August 11, 2024, op. cit.; The Washington Post, August 12, 2024, op. cit.
5. As cited above.
6. Spectrum News 1, August 11, 2024, op. cit.
7. The New York Times, "White House Pushes 'Alternative Facts.' Here Are the Real Ones.," January 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/us/politics/president-trump-inauguration-crowd-white-house.html; The Washington Post, "The true, correct story of what happened at Donald Trump's inauguration," January 24, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/01/24/the-true-correct-story-of-what-happened-at-donald-trumps-inauguration/; CNN, "National Park Service edited inauguration photos after Trump, Spicer calls," September 9, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/07/politics/trump-inauguration-photos/index.html.
8. The Washington Post, "Spicer earns Four Pinocchios for false claims on inauguration crowd size," January 22, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/22/spicer-earns-four-pinocchios-for-a-series-of-false-claims-on-inauguration-crowd-size/;The New York Times, "Sean Spicer Says He Regrets Berating Reporters Over Inauguration Crowds," September 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/arts/television/sean-spicer-emmys.html.
9. The New York Times, September 18, 2017, op. cit.
10. Ibid.
11. The Washington Post, "Trump's false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years," January 24, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/; The New York Times, "Trump's Lies," December 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html; The Washington Post, "President Trump made 18,000 false or misleading claims in 1,170 days," April 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/14/president-trump-made-18000-false-or-misleading-claims-1170-days/; The Washington Post, August 12, 2024, op. cit.; The New York Times, "Many Politicians Lie. But Trump Has Elevated the Art of Fabrication.," August 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/us/politics/lies-trump-obama-mislead.html; Bloomberg, "My Lawyers Got Trump to Admit 30 Lies Under Oath," June 12, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-06-12/trump-s-history-of-lies-according-to-biographer-timothy-o-brien.