What’s Rattling Trump: The Size of Harris’s Crowds
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The Walk of Shame? Why was he so down?
Trump 'furious' about 'underwhelming' crowd at Tulsa rally
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The numbers game is everything to Donald J. Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris’s first big rally appears to have gotten under his skin.
When former President Donald J. Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in Atlanta on Saturday...If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapors.
“Crazy Kamala,” he fumed a minute into his speech. “She was here a week ago — lots of empty seats — but the crowd she got was because she had entertainers.”
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Ms. Harris’s rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday, when she is expected to unveil her running mate, is likely to be a blowout. ...It’s all starting to screw with Mr. Trump’s psyche.
In Atlanta, his surrogates reassured everyone that he was still the hottest ticket in town.
Still, Mr. Trump couldn’t help but focus on those who weren’t piling in. He claimed that Georgia State University officials in charge of the arena prevented him from letting in more people.
In Mr. Trump’s telling, this wasn’t a safety protocol but a conspiracy to humiliate him, perpetrated by the university and other nefarious forces. It all connects, in his estimation, to the biggest numbers game he has ever lost. “If they’re going to stand in the way of admitting people to our rally, just imagine what they’re going to do on Election Day,” he said.
This goes to the core of Mr. Trump’s crowd-size fixation. He seems to believe that a full arena is a predictor of his ultimate victory — as if the voters in that arena were representative of the country at large. ...
Thirty minutes into his speech, he became distracted again by the seating: “There’s some seats right up there — they could let them come in.”
He complained about the venue to Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Republican of Georgia, who was sitting in the front row: “It’s obviously, Marjorie, a very liberal school, I guess, right? I’m not happy with the school.” He claimed that “they don’t want to show that we’re successful.”
And then he was back, once again, on Ms. Harris and her crowd size. “She has to go get entertainers,” he repeated. “They start leaving as soon as she opens her mouth.”
This seemed like pure projection. If Mr. Trump had looked up from his teleprompter at any point during the second half of his 90-minute speech, he would have seen his own supporters slipping out of their bright blue seats, headed for the exits. Slowly but surely, across every stand and in every section, they streamed out. Stage left, a man in a star-spangled cowboy hat sidled down his row at the halfway mark. Two men holding signs bearing Mr. Trump’s mugshot tiptoed up their aisle a minute later. A young woman led her family away...
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...an hour into his speech, the Atlanta crowd had emptied out more than usual. Large splotches of blue had blossomed across the upper stands, and people on the floor had started to sneak away, too.
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But there was something about Ms. Harris’s star turn at the same arena that had unsettled Mr. Trump. He seemed to be pining for the glory days of his first campaign, back when his rollicking rallies were but a harbinger of a stunning victory to come.
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Very insightful piece by Shawn McCreesh.
