People gather on the National Mall as President Donald Trump speaks during a “Salute to America” event on the South Lawn of the White House, Saturday, July 4, 2020, in Washington.
Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
- Speaking in Nashville, the former president spent several minutes boasting about the crowd size for his speeches.
- Trump bragged incorrectly that his speeches had bigger audiences than Martin Luther King Jr ‘I Have A Dream’ speech.
- Trump said his speech on January 6, 2021, which preceded the Capitol riot was “the largest number of people I’ve ever spoken to.”
Former President Donald Trump bragging on Friday that he has drawn in larger crowds to his speeches on at least two occasions than Martin Luther King Jr. did for his 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech.
Speaking to the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Nashville, Tennessee, the former president spent several minutes boasting about the crowd size for his speeches on the National Mall on July 4, 2020, and on January 6, 2021, near the White House.
—CSPAN (@cspan) June 17, 2022
Photographs of King’s speech show “massive, tremendous numbers of people,” Trump said. “They said it was a million people.”
Historians say that the number of people who attended King’s iconic civil rights speech is closer to 250,000.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, D.C. on Aug. 28, 1963.
AP Photo/File
“Now, my pictures were exactly the same, but the people were slightly closer together,” Trump said. “They were more compact but exactly the same. But there were more people. They were tighter together if you look at it.”
The media, the former president said, reported that only 25,000 people attended his 2020 speech. “That’s what we have to put up with,” the former president added.
Official estimates for the “Salute to America” speech in 2020 are unavailable, but the Chicago Tribune reported that crowds were “strikingly thinner” than Trump’s speech in 2019. There are also no official estimates for attendance in 2019.
Trump said his speech on January 6, 2021, which preceded the Capitol riot, had even more attendance than his speeches on the National Mall. The speech, he claimed, involved “the largest number of people I’ve ever spoken to.”
The former president has repeatedly claimed that the crowd size was “censored” by the media, saying that a “sacred number” attended his speech.
According to the Associated Press, at least 10,000 people attended.
