When the Internet Found Trump’s Photoshopped Rally Photo and Criticized Him: “The Largest Crowd Ever”

In the past, former President Donald Trump had been accused of photo-editing images to showcase his enormous following and is known to embellish information about his political career. One such image was widely circulated on X, a user shared Trump addressing a large rally, however, upon closer look the picture has four sets of audience pasted into the actual crowd. "Crowd size is so important to Donald Trump, that they have to photoshop large crowds in to stoke his fragile ego!" the tweet read. 

As per Snopes, the said image was first posted on Facebook by a satire page called 'The Taunt the Elephant' on June 27, 2022. The image—which included the same audience members four times throughout the crowd—was claimed to have been shared by the Trump team, according to the post. This photo's sarcastic caption read, "Official Trump rally photo where they had the largest crowd* ever, period (of quadruplets)."  Though the caption implied otherwise, there is no proof that Trump or his crew promoted the photo through official means. However, "The largest crowd ever, period" in the caption was a reference to comments made by former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer in January 2017. In the first week of Trump's presidency, Spicer vehemently defended the size of the inaugural audience as images emerged seemingly showing that the ceremony for former US President Barack Obama had drawn a far larger attendance. 

As per The Guardian, when the White House misimplied that Trump had drawn the largest crowd during his inauguration, controversy broke out. According to disclosed documents, a government photographer altered official photos from the Republican leader's inauguration to inflate the crowd after the president personally intervened. In response to Trump's request for fresh photos on the first morning of his administration, the photographer clipped off a blank area "where the crowd ended." Trump was incensed by photos that suggested his audience was smaller than that of Barack Obama in 2009. 

The information came to light in investigative reports that the US Interior Department's inspector general provided to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. Documents from January 21, 2017, reveal a flurry of activity within the National Park Service (NPS) following a phone conversation between Trump and Michael Reynolds, the acting head of the NPS. They also claim that in an attempt to obtain the more attractive shots that day, Spicer, the press secretary for the White House at the time, called NPS representatives many times. 

Investigators were informed by an NPS communications official—whose identity was withheld in the publicly available records—that following her conversation with the president, Reynolds contacted and mentioned that Trump had requested photos from the inauguration. She claimed that the pictures that have been made public thus far "show a lot of empty areas" and that "she got the impression that President Trump wanted to see pictures that appeared to depict more spectators in the crowd." Investigators were informed by a second NPS public relations staffer that Spicer had called her office early on January 21 to request images that "accurately represented the inauguration crowd size." The NPS photographer revealed that "he edited the inauguration photographs to make them look more symmetrical by cropping out the sky and cropping out the bottom where the crowd ended,” the investigators reported, adding: “He said he did so to show that there had been more of a crowd.” According to the public documents, Spicer was actively involved in the attempt to get more flattering pictures of the inaugural crowd in 2017. 

Editor's note: This article was originally published on May 5, 2024. It has since been updated.