- Trump said he drew a bigger crowd on January 6 than Martin Luther King Jr. did in 1963.
- "My friend, we actually had more people," he said at a press conference on Thursday.
Former President Donald Trump is comparing himself to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. — at least when it comes to crowd size.
During a freewheeling press conference at his Mar-A-Lago resort on Thursday, Trump claimed he drew a bigger crowd on January 6, 2021, than King did for his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.
"I'll tell you, it's very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture— a small number of people, relatively, going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd," Trump said of the "Stop the Steal" rally, which he addressed before some rioters breached the Capitol. "The biggest crowd I've ever spoken — I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me."
"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," Trump said. "They said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people. But when you look at the exact same picture, and everything's the same because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to… from Lincoln to Washington. And you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd, my friend, we actually had more people."
Trump on his January 6 speech: "Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours ... we had more." pic.twitter.com/i9DL82vuLg
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 8, 2024
King's speech drew an estimated 250,000 people. It remains unclear how large the "Stop the Steal" crowd was, though the Associated Press has reported that it reached 10,000 by the afternoon when the riot began.
This isn't the first time Trump's compared his crowd sizes to MLK Jr's, or suggested the crowd he drew on January 6 exceeded that of the civil rights icon.
In June 2022, he told an audience in Tennessee that he drew a bigger crowd for his Fourth of July speech in 2020 than King did. He went on to say that the crowd he addressed on January 6 was the "largest number of people I've ever spoken to."
And crowd size has long been a fixation of Trump's.
The week he was inaugurated in 2017, he infamously claimed to have drawn a larger crowd size than President Barack Obama in 2008, leading then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to berate reporters at his first official press briefing for not reporting that as fact.