After falsely claiming that images of Vice President Kamala Harris’s supporters at an Aug. 7 rally were artificially generated, Donald Trump appeared to do an about-face on the topic when confronted by a reporter Wednesday, telling her that he “can’t say” what or who was there.
After voting early in Florida’s primary, Trump was asked about his disproven claims sowing doubt over the large crowds that Harris has been addressing in recent campaign stops in battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona.
“You said Harris’s crowds were AI and that there weren’t people there. There’s all kinds of video evidence and people who were there that have proven that false,” CNN’s Kate Sullivan began, referring to how Trump argued that “nobody” attended Harris’s Detroit rally and that she “‘A.I.’d’ it.” According to the Harris campaign, 10,000 people were present.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump opted not to repeat his baseless assertion.
“Well, I can’t say what was there, who was there. I can only tell you about ours,” he said, before again fixating on the size of his own crowds—a strategy that some in the GOP don’t see as a winning strategy. “We have crowds that nobody’s ever seen before.”
Some Democrats have pointed to Trump’s insistence that people should ignore what’s clearly visible as evidence that he is priming his supporters to deny the results of the upcoming election if he loses.
“If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent,’” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote in a statement Tuesday.
