On his first full day as president in 2017, Donald Trump dispatched Sean Spicer, his press secretary, to yell at a roomful of White House reporters that his new boss had the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period! — both in person and around the globe.”
Except that Trump didn’t.
By using one of his first official acts in the White House to disseminate lies about something as insignificant as the attendance at his inauguration, Trump proved that when it comes to crowds, he’s a size queen who wants his rallies to be big, bigger, and bigly.
Seven years and two presidential campaigns later, nothing has changed.
In common parlance, a size queen is someone fixated with a partner’s physical endowment. And Trump has always been obsessed with the size of his crowds. Arenas filled with people chanting his name and tittering at his stale insults reinforce the fragile sense of virility and strength of a man who has never won the popular vote in a presidential election.
But since she declared her candidacy last month, Vice President Kamala Harris, and now her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, are regularly drawing huge crowds of effusive supporters in battleground states. And that’s left Trump — already unmoored by his stunning reversal of fortune since President Biden ended his reelection bid — seething.
In recent days, the former president has ratcheted up his mendacious rants with claims that the Harris campaign used artificial intelligence to create the illusion of massive crowds greeting her and Walz at a suburban Detroit airport last week.
With his poll numbers reportedly tilting between stagnant and sagging, Trump’s anger is spiking, not that it ever seems to fully dissipate. His declaration that thousands of Harris/Walz supporters at rallies “didn’t exist” is just the latest remix of claims debunked by a report commissioned by his own campaign that “about 5,000″ dead people in Georgia voted in the 2020 presidential election.
There are various reasons for Trump’s whining about rally crowd sizes, which he mentioned more than a dozen times during his lie-stuffed Mar-a-Lago press conference last week.
Oversized, compliant crowds are the window dressing of authoritarianism. That’s why Trump’s rallies seem reminiscent of the hours-long speeches that Fidel Castro regularly inflicted on Cubans during his dictatorial reign. Looking down both literally and figuratively at the masses, it’s not love Trump sees but a reflection of his own ruthlessness.
For Trump, dwelling on crowd size pulls the spotlight from less desirable topics like Project 2025, the 900-page autocratic wish list he claims to know nothing about. It’s also a distraction, one that keeps the media playing the “What loopy thing will he say next” game. Like a toddler who recognizes how much attention comes with yelling a cuss word, Trump understands how to wrestle the media spotlight back in his direction.
But Trump’s real plan is to delegitimize Harris’s historic campaign. When he falsely accused her of doctoring crowd photos, he called her “a cheater” and said Harris, “should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”
Prejudging elections as rigged or claiming that his opponent is guilty of interference is a Trump tactic that dates back to his race against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Weeks before that election and without any evidence, Trump said the race had already been rigged against him.
But what began as a megalomaniac’s soft-landing explanation in case he was defeated became a cry of vengeance that incited the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection after he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Now stripped of his certainty that be could beat Biden in November, he’s painting Harris in particular and Democrats in general as willing to phony up facts and photos to manipulate voters.
Which is something Trump attempted to do barely 24 hours after his inauguration. But such efforts have become even more nefarious. Trump and his far-right minions are methodically undermining trust in this nation’s elections, democracy’s bedrock.
Some Republicans, like Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, are telling Trump to “Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning” Harris’s political position. He won’t. His size queen ego won’t allow him to fathom that anyone — especially a Black woman — could draw bigger crowds than he can.
Call what Trump is doing a distraction or another worrying sign of this nation’s oldest major party nominee’s delusional state. But also recognize his increasing desperation as a grim warning of more outlandish lies, baseless accusations, and even more abhorrent behavior to come.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.