Donald Trump Says He 'Never' Has an Empty Seat — Then The Cameras Were Turned Around

Donald Trump faced ridicule yet again after his boasts about his crowd sizes were contradicted by visual evidence. At a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, just as Trump raved about how the place was packed, the cameras panned to show a lot of empty seats. "You know, we get up and we talk, we talk, and I noticed something, somebody was telling me the other day, we do a lot of these beautiful rallies and it's so great. We never have an empty seat. Never have—Look at them, 100,000 people or more. Never have an empty," Trump had declared to his supporters.

However, in reality, the arena, which houses about 7,200 seats, looked empty, as per The Washington Post's Dana Milbank. When Trump began his speech, there were still a lot of empty seats behind the press area, as per The New Republic. To make matters worse, people started leaving during his talk. Moreover, there were empty chairs right behind him while he was on camera. This exodus stood in stark contrast to Trump's narrative of unwavering support and packed houses.

The incident is just another example of Trump’s known fixation with crowd sizes, and the ex-president has a habit of criticizing other politicians for not being able to attract crowds like his. During his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump relied heavily on visuals of large crowds at rallies to demonstrate his popularity among common Americans — to show they were all in on his message. But Trump's tendency to inflate numbers isn't limited to recent events. In August, he made the audacious claim that his January 6 crowd size surpassed that of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March in Washington — a statement easily disproven by photographic evidence.

Trump's fixation on crowd sizes has become a running theme in his political life. Following his 2017 inauguration, then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, infamously declared they had the 'largest audience to witness an inauguration,' a statement PolitiFact deemed incorrect. On another occasion, Trump admitted to discussing crowd size with his wife. “I call up my wife, and say, ‘Baby, who can draw crowds…nobody can draw crowds like me, not even close,’” he remarked.

The former president's obsession with attendance figures has not gone unnoticed by his political rivals. During a recent campaign stop in Arizona, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, running mate to Vice President Kamala Harris, took a subtle jab at Trump's preoccupation. After praising the size of their Michigan rally crowd, Walz quipped with a smile, "It's not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything."

Suffice it to say that this pattern of exaggeration extends beyond crowd sizes. At the Pennsylvania rally, Trump made other assertions that weren’t true or were misleading. He claimed that there were no terrorist attacks while he was in office, as per CNN, and that kids were getting gender-affirming surgery without the consent of their parents.