Rally Crowd Smaller Than Trump Claims, Just Like His Wanger
Rally Crowd Smaller Than Trump Claims, Just Like His Wanger
Aaaaand now you're thinking about Trump's wanger.
How many people attended Donald Trump’s old-fashioned political wiederbelebung in the South Bronx on Thursday night? Way less than his campaign claims? How weird, old Melon Mussolini and his sycophants are usually so honest about these matters.
Newsweek has a quick rundown. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung claimed 25,000 people attended. A reporter for Newsmax also claimed 25,000 to 30,000. Various Trump sycophants like this dipshit from Turning Point USA claimed “WOW! EVER WONDER WHAT 30,000 PEOPLE AT A TRUMP RALLY LOOKS LIKE?”
WOW! That would indeed be quite a feat, to pull that many people in one of the bluest districts in America, in a city that collectively loathes Donald Trump with the white-hot intensity of a thousand exploding suns.
Anyway, to answer the Turning Point USA dipshit, over 30,000 people at a Trump rally looks a lot like approximately 2,500 people at a Trump rally. Like so:
Either that drone was in high Earth orbit when it snapped that picture, or the Trump people are — heavens! — lying like rugs. That’s a small crowd for a bar mitzvah, let alone a presidential rally.
Honestly, this is the most pathetic Trump rally fluffing we’ve seen since last week, when his campaign pretended that 100,000 people showed up to hear him babble about Hannibal Lecter on a beach in New Jersey, without mention that approximately 99,990 of them were not there for Trump, but rather because it was a beach in May.
Oh hey hey! Remember when Trump sent … was it Sean Spicer? … out to lie with a straight face about the size of his inauguration? It was a whole thing!
The local ABC news station in New York City had an amusing segment with a somewhat harsher assessment of the rally’s turnout:
Compare that with CNN reporter Kristen Holmes, who said the rally had “certainly a bigger crowd than I think Democrats would like to see, particularly given this is one of the bluest counties in the entire country.” To which the obvious responses are a) 3,500 people in a city of 8 million that has voted decisively against Trump in the last two elections is not exactly evidence of an incipient groundswell of support, no matter how enthusiastically the nuts waved their red MAGA hats around, so we doubt the Democrats are sweating it, and b) if CNN reporters are that thirsty for some excitement in this campaign, might we suggest reporting on — oh, spitballing here — Trump’s public plans to end American democracy? That seems important!
There has been a bit of an uptick in recent days of Trump sycophants talking about expanding their electoral map — Lara Trump has supposedly made noises with her mouth hole about competing in California, but at least she had the decency to not destroy America’s eardrums by singing it — and a rally in the Bronx is presumably part of that strategy. Plus, Pumpkin Pinochet has been cooped up in a courtroom for five weeks and probably needed to get out of the house and get his mind off his potential felony convictions that could get handed down as soon as next week, and there are few places left in New York he can go without being pelted with bags of flaming dog shit.
Hence, a rally in the Bronx, just a short drive from Trump Tower, where you could screen attendees for bags of dog shit and cans of lighter fluid. The campaign could count on its usual right-wing media sycophants to flat-out lie, and it could count on a mainstream outlet like CNN to help launder those lies to its not-insane audience.
At his campaign kickoff in June of 2015, Trump opened by bragging about the “thousands of people” who had turned out to his skyscraper for his big announcement. We were there and so can report that some of the reporters around us in the press pen let out audible scoffs at what we could all see was a giant lie. You’d think in the — God help us — nine years since then, the media would have learned to not give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
Alas.
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What is even more dangerous than the fact that non-insane-far-right outlets have shown over and over and over that they will just take whatever the Trump "media" team sends them and print it is this:
Trump is setting up the framework for his next coup attempt with this stuff.
So the Trump campaign is already laying the framework to deny it when he loses the 2024 election. We know this. And now he can point to his drooling followers and say (except he'd say it in his dumb baby-talk way), "Look at this, dummies who will kill for me! We had that unprecedented crown in New Jersey. What was it? 100,000? I think it was 150,000, actually." (He's already raised it from 80,000 to 100,00 to 117,000, so by November it might actually be a million, who knows.)
And he'll say (again, flappy sphincter-mouth baby talk given), "Do the math!". Oh, hey! Great 3-word chant for his followers, who love those things and can't remember more than 3 syllables at once. So he'll say, "Do the math! A small state like New Jersey had 175,000 people there to hear me and see me and touch the hem of my tie to heal their leprosy. In a small state like that, 180,000 people is a lot. It's just proof that a huuuuge percentage of that state love Trump. They love Trump!"
And he'll go on (you know the drill) to say, "I told you then that my massive crowd was showing the country that New Jersey was turning red. And yet they say we only got 20% of the vote in New Jersey? When we were drawing those huuuuuge crowds? If that's not proof that they're cheating, I don't know what is. And then in the Bronx! New York, loves Trump! Loves him! I think it was among the bigger crowds that have ever gotten together in the Bronx, probably the largest crowd in the history of New York State. Nobody had ever seen anything like it."
"You want proof that New York cheated? Just look at that."
And along with claiming that such unprecedented numbers of people turning out to see Trump in these blue states proves that they'd turned red and were in play in the election, that the fact that Trump lost those states, or at least didn't get 49% is solid proof that the Dems stole ballots or something, he's got his minions out there with talking points, hitting the same messages.
They're claiming that every single state is in play. They're setting up the rabid disciples to believe it, "proving" that those states love Trump.
Lara Trump is already working on California.
NY bodega visit? Stocked with NY Young Republicans.
Atlanta (blue city Trump claimed was tampered with in 2020) Chik-fil-a? Black people come up to Trump and hug him and thank him! (As if Trump would let a random person touch him.) Stocked with plants, including the hugging lady who is a Republican Party operative.
Libertarian Convention? MAGA ringers sent in early to take all the seats so that all the speech clips would be ringing with applause and cheers. Sadly for Trump, the Libertarians weren't having it and the boos were loud and lovely.
NASCAR in North Carolina? Tell everyone that the cheers when your plane flies over are for Trump when they're really for Matchbox 20. Go around with a retinue behind you staging photo ops where you try to make it look like thousands or adoring NASCAR fans are all over Trump. Give the propaganda team a bunch of shots to lie about with Trump in front of a huge crowd. Weirdly salute once in a while so those shots can be made to look like it was a military event. (Since Trump actually hates the military.) Get the lazy Trump to do a bunch of these in one day. (I already saw a piece in the Daily Mail breathlessly gushing about all of this.)
The NASCAR one was in a red area, but that was for the propaganda reel. The campaign has been building all of these fake events of people (MAGA plants) "spontaneously" going nuts for Trump in mostly blue areas. so that they can go back and point to them as proof that the next election was stolen.
It would be easy to just write this off as Trump's ego and its constant need for feeding. And I'm sure that's a great side-effect. It would be easy to think that it's infuriating, but not important compared to other stuff the campaign is pulling. But these self-created spontaneous press opportunities could be the thing that proves to the MAGA base that Trump is right, and sets them off for Coup 2.0.
I hope CNN is happy for their ratings this year when Trump sends all of their anchors to the Donald Trump "Enemies of the People" Camp for Journalists.
I hope CNN and their friends are all happy with their 2024 horserace ratings and are comforted remembering them when their anchors are all rounded up and sent to the Donald J. Trump Camp for Enemies of the People. (On a side note, I hope that the 6 "conservative" Supreme Court justices think that the vacations and tour buses and hard, cold cash were worth it when they're rounded up and sent there right after.)
Not to mention, but I will…
A lot of that ‘crowd’ looked suspiciously white for the Bronx, which is something like 50% Hispanic and 40% Black. So, where did the white faces come from? Paid? Bused in from Staten Island? Since something like 83% of the Bronx voted for Biden in 2020, this seems like another case of the Yam being to lazy to actually go out and campaign anywhere where it really matters.
As long as he keeps focusing on unwinnable states, like NY, Minnesota (where he lost by 200,000 votes) and California, that keeps him from working in states that really count.