Kamala Harris Provokes Donald Trump With Harsh Reality Check of Rally Sizes at Debate

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris met for their first face-off at Tuesday night's presidential debate in Philadelphia. They were obviously not being friendly, even though they shook hands. Harris, in fact, proceeded to agitate Trump to the point where he seemed to have lost his temper. His sensitivity was piqued when she made a scathing remark about the turnout at his campaign events.

As reported by HuffPost, Harris spoke while staring directly at the camera, "I’m going to invite you to attend one of Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You’ll hear about Hannibal Lecter, how windmills cause cancer, and what you’ll also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. The only thing you won’t hear him talk about is your needs, your dreams and your desires." 

Trump, on the other hand, took exception to the comment about his rally attendance and responded angrily. Rather than address the topic of immigration policy, he said that 'nobody goes' to Harris' rallies, implying that those who do go are being 'bussed in' and 'paid to go' to her gatherings. Trump said, "We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible in the history of politics." Nevertheless, many of his critics have pointed out that Trump has an odd obsession with the size of his rally audiences and when he gets challenged for their size, he tends to retaliate. 

Furthermore, on Tuesday, the Harris campaign released a new commercial that pokes fun at the former president and his apparent obsession with audience size. In the 30-second commercial, the audience witnesses Trump campaign rallies with sparse and demoralized audiences, then cutting to a Harris event with an arena full of people.

It also includes a speech at the Democratic National Convention, where former President Barack Obama criticized Trump, calling him a '78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems.' The video also included Obama making a hand motion that seemed to be a jab at Trump as he remarked, "This weird obsession with crowd sizes."

From his first presidential campaign forward, Trump has been fixated on the size of his audience. According to The Washington Post, he consistently outdrew his Republican opponents and Hillary Clinton, and he would even go so far as to inflate the size of his turnouts at campaign events. The Post reported that in 2015, Trump's team relocated a rally in Phoenix to a bigger location to accommodate the 4,200 attendees. However, Trump then said that the audience size was over 15,000 people. 

Trump's most recent infamous lie about the size of the audience was about his address near the National Mall on January 6, 2021. He said that there were more people there than during Martin Luther King Jr.'s monumental 1963 March on Washington speech. The National Constitution Centre reported King was heard by almost 250,000 people, disproving Trump's claim as well. Protesters gathered over 53,000 strong, according to the Jan. 6 committee's estimate.