Trump: I drew bigger crowd than at Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech

Experts cast doubts on his claim as presidential candidate says his Jan 6 address in Washington ‘had more people’

Donald Trump has claimed he drew a larger crowd to a speech in Washington than Martin Luther King for his “I have a dream” speech.
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump told the audience at a press conference in Mar-a-Lago on Thursday. “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.”
Trump’s remarks came as the Kamala Harris campaign celebrated large crowds drawn to the vice president’s tour of battleground states.
When asked if Ms Harris’s crowd sizes concerned him, a visibly frustrated Trump lashed out at the “dishonest” press, insisting his rallies were “10 times, 20 times, 30 times” bigger.
“Oh, give me a break,” Trump said. “Listen, I had 107,000 people in New Jersey, you didn’t report it. I’m so glad you asked. What did she have yesterday, 2,000 people?”
He went on to claim pictures showed he had more supporters than King’s famous speech at the Washington Monument in his address on Jan 6, the day of the Capitol riot.
“When you look at the exact same picture and everything’s the same … you look at it and you look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd – we actually had more people,” he said.
But experts have cast doubt on Trump’s claims.
Reports show that King’s 1963 speech drew around 250,000 people, while the House Select Committee – responsible for investigating the events of Jan 6 – estimates that Trump’s speech saw 53,000 people congregate in Washington.
Cassidy Hutchinson, the White House staffer, previously told the committee that the crowd was purposely made “long and narrow” to “make for a better picture” on Jan 6.
She testified that Trump wanted to skip the security screening service to quickly pad the crowd out after he expressed fury at how far people were stretched apart.
Recent polls show Ms Harris ahead in the national vote, a significant reversal since she replaced Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket.
At her first rally as a candidate last month, Ms Harris packed a roughly 8,000-capacity arena in Atlanta, while Tim Walz, her running mate, appeared surprised by the 14,000 supporters who welcomed him to the race.
Ms Harris is currently polling at 48 per cent, according to a poll by The New York Times, while Trump is behind at 47 per cent.
The former president has expressed frustration at Ms Harris’ performance and the excitement around her campaign.
“It’s unfair that I beat him [Biden] and now I have to beat her, too,” he told an ally in a phone call last weekend, according to The Washington Post.