Trump’s Latest Falsehood Is a Huge Tell
5 min read
When Donald Trump is at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened, he tells fans not to believe their own eyes and ears.
After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the event a “love fest,” denying the video evidence of the violence. After the writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual assault, he said he had “never met” her, despite a photo showing them together.
And yesterday, after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were “fake” and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theory—touted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsense—that the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo from her August 7 event in Romulus, Michigan.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “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!”
The turnout at Harris events is entirely real, and political analysts suspect that the crowds she has attracted are making Trump jealous and nervous. But the AI lie is about more than Trump’s size anxiety—it portends a dark and desperate chapter in this already distressing presidential-election season.
Alex King, a 32-year-old political organizer who lives outside Detroit, was at the August 7 rally holding a Harris-Walz sign and wearing a blue shirt. He immediately recognized himself in the picture that Trump shared and pretended was fake yesterday. “There was nobody there!” Trump wrote. But King was there, and he told me the former president’s post was “disheartening and frankly disrespectful.”
Every time Trump challenges his fans to side with him over photographic proof of reality, it’s disrespectful. I have been keeping an informal list of such episodes since the inauguration-crowd-size controversy of 2017, and they are typically driven by Trump’s enormous insecurity.
“The first lie of the Trump presidency,” as The Atlantic’s Megan Garber dubbed the inauguration freakout, began with a 5 a.m. segment on CNN the day after Trump was inaugurated. The CNN anchor John Berman very gently pointed out that Trump had predicted “they were going to break records with the crowds” in Washington, but “it doesn’t look like they did,” and he showed a graphic juxtaposing Barack Obama’s historic 2009 crowd on the left and Trump’s smaller crowd on the right. Trump erupted, and his aides came up with “alternative facts” to deny reality.
Toward the end of his presidency, Trump minimized the crowd sizes at protests, claiming that Black Lives Matter drew a “much smaller crowd in D.C. than anticipated” when in fact a rally over the death of George Floyd in police custody was the largest gathering in the nation’s capital since the Women’s March on the day after his inauguration.
More recently, during his hush-money trial in Lower Manhattan this spring, Trump was reportedly disappointed that his supporters did not flock to the area around the courthouse. He made excuses when reporters pointed out that the park across the street was practically empty. “Thousands of people were turned away from the courthouse,” he lied, calling the area “an armed camp to keep people away.” I pulled out my cameraphone to show how easy it was to visit the neighborhood, and told New Yorkers to come see for themselves.
But Trump’s repeated claims that you shouldn’t believe your own eyes have been buttressed by his near-decade-long insistence that real news is “fake.” A Trump devotee would have a hard time trusting my photo of the wide-open courthouse entrance over Trump’s comforting lie.
I have come to view this as a method of control. The rejection of video evidence, the dismissal of photo proof, even the new lie invoking AI—these claims all leave people arguing over the most basic tenets of reality, and cause some people to give up and give in. As Chico Marx asked in the 1933 film Duck Soup, “Who are ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Richard Pryor later adapted the line: “Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?” Trump has brought the concept into the 21st century.
Some of his photo-denying disputes have been minor, and maybe even humorous. One day in 2019, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s advisers “wrote new talking points and handed him reams of opposition research” for his attacks against the Democratic lawmakers known as the “Squad.” Trump claimed that “there were no talking points” even though a Post photographer, Jabin Botsford, had taken a close-up photo of his prepared notes.
Every instance of Trump disputing the indisputable is revealing in its own way. As Hurricane Dorian sideswiped the Eastern Seaboard, in the fall of 2019, Trump contradicted his own government’s weather maps and claimed that Alabama was in the path of the hurricane when the state was not, then tried to convince people that his faulty forecast was correct. That same year, as Britain’s Prince Andrew was ensnared in sexual-misconduct allegations, Trump said “I don’t know him, no,” despite multiple photos of the two men together, including one taken just six months before.
Vulnerability seems to be the through line here—whether Trump is at risk of trivial embarrassment, criminal exposure, or being caught in lies. A public figure with truth on their side would say Roll the tape to show they’re right. Trump, instead, says, Don’t believe the tape. Just believe me instead.
The aftermath of January 6 is probably the most extreme example of his reality-denial. He watched the insurrection unfold on live TV but then tried to erase the public’s memory of the images. On the one-year anniversary of the attack, Representative Jamie Raskin said on CNN that he felt bad for Trump adherents because “they are essentially in a political religious cult, and their cult leader, Donald Trump, is telling them they can’t believe their own eyes, the evidence of their own experience, and their own ears.”
That’s what Trump did again yesterday—only this time, the proliferation of AI-image-making tools made it easier than ever to sow doubt. Trump is “entering the ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’ phase, as predicted,” the Atlantic contributor Renee DiResta wrote on Threads. “The ability to plausibly cast doubt on the real is the unintended consequence of being able to generate unreality.”
King, one of the real people in the Michigan crowd that Trump said didn’t exist, found the new crowd-size lie dispiriting. “It would be nice for us voters to be able to have discussions on the substantive issues that are at stake in this election,” he told me, “not be hyperfocused on distractions and conspiracy theories.”
Yes—but it is also essential to track how Trump tries to trick people. His is a campaign of disbelief. If Trump is so shaken by Harris that he will insist her thousands of supporters don’t exist, what else will he say and do to deny reality?
