Air Force Two taxis on the tarmac as several thousand attendees applaud during a presidential campaign rally for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Romulus, Michigan, on August 7, 2024. | Source: Anadolu / Getty
No matter how things turn out in November, Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 election and making room for Vice President Kamala Harris to step up to the plate has given us a much more interesting and entertaining presidential race. (Seriously, I was not looking forward to watching that particular sequel of Grumpy Old Men.) If nothing else, it has been amusing and satisfying to watch Donald Trump squirm, cower and get more and more desperate in his feeble attempts at attacking Harris, whose popularity only appears to be increasing so far.
Now, Trump wants people to believe the only reason Harris has appeared to draw visibly larger crowds than he has in recent weeks is that she and her campaign have been using AI technology to make her audiences appear larger than they actually are.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote on his erroneously titled “Truth” Social platform. “There was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches.”
Now, when Trump says it has been “confirmed” that photos of Harris’ crowd were “A.I.’d,” he doesn’t mean confined in any conventional sense—like with facts and tangible evidence. When it comes to fact-finding, Trump lives on Trust Me Bro Lane and rents a vacation house on Pulled That Out My Arse Manor. So, in true Trumpian form, the ex-president followed up his post with a photo of Harris’ crowd that didn’t prove any of what he claimed had been “confirmed.” Instead, it was a regular-degular photo that had clearly been brightened but showed zero signs of having been generated by artificial intelligence.
“1) This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” Harris’ campaign wrote in response to Trump’s absurd allegation. “2) Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week… Low energy?”
I suppose it makes sense that Trump thinks the photo is provably fake because a person looking at the photo can’t see the reflection of the crowd in Air Force 2. This is, after all, the same man who believes military ships will sink into the ocean because the batteries in them are too heavy and that passengers will be made to choose between being electrocuted by the battery after it sinks in water or being eaten by sharks.
Trump is simply not a person who understands how anything works, which he further proved by insisting that the use of an AI photo—even if it did happen, which it didn’t—should disqualify Harris from the presidency as it somehow constitutes election interference.
“She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” says the guy who currently has cases brought against him in multiple states that have accused him of election interference.
The depths of Trump’s delusion are truly bottomless. This man really believes—or is pretending to believe—that the use of AI images during a campaign qualifies as election interference, but starting an entire “stop the steal” propaganda campaign based on zero evidence ultimately resulting in a riot at the U.S. Capitol doesn’t qualify.
Mind you, Trump also falsely blamed AI in March when House Democrats put together a Trump gaffe reel and presented it before the House Judiciary Committee during testimony by former special counsel Robert Hur, who was called to explain his report in which he claimed Biden’s memory and cognitive acuity are “significantly limited.”
“Artificial intelligence was used by them against me in their videos,” Trump wrote about video montage of his gaffes, which millions of Americans saw happen in real-time.
Again, the desperation and transparent insecurity is just fun to watch. It was amusing to watch Trump whine, kick and scream about having to debate Harris on ABC News, despite agreeing to the debate when he thought he would be up against Biden. (Especially since, prior to Biden dropping out, Trump predicted that Harris would be even easier to beat because he thought she was so unpopular.) It’s even at least mildly amusing to watch Trump repeatedly question Harris’ racial identity as if it were any of his Caucasian business in the first place because even Republican officials agree that Trump is shooting himself and his party in the feet by continuing to default to racist and sexist attacks on his opponent. Unfortunately for them, their MAGA messiah is far too bigoted, egotistical and insecure to be able to stop himself. And Harris having larger crowds than his is not helping.
Recently, Trump got so flustered after a reporter asked him if he was worried about the size of Harris’ crowds that, in a fit of frustration, he boldly claimed his Jan. 6 speech drew an audience equal to or greater than the audience Martin Luther King Jr. drew when he delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. He eventually conceded he was wrong because any idiot with access to a search engine could have told him King’s speech was attended by roughly 250,000 people while his speech that preceded a domestic terrorist attack only had roughly 50,000 attendees.
The truth is just as easily attainable when it comes to Harris’ crowd in Michigan. The rally was attended by prominent news organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post, which both confirmed Harris’ crowd was as large as Trump’s photo and a myriad of other photos floating around social media indicate. The rally was also broadcast live on C-SPAN giving people ample opportunity to see for themselves how large the crowd was. (Fact-checking Trump might be tedious and endless work, but it’s never difficult.)
Again, watching Trump flail like this is refreshing and it almost makes getting through the rest of this election year bearable.
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