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United States Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) released a statement on Tuesday decrying former President Donald Trump’s claims that Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign crowd sizes were “fake,” noting that Trump was doing so as part of an effort to undermine the legitimacy of Harris’s popularity, a sign that he would try to create doubts over the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, should he lose to her this fall.
Trump tried to stir uncertainty over Harris’s crowd size at a rally in Detroit, Michigan, in a Truth Social post over the weekend.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? 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!” Trump said, adding for emphasis that, in his mind at least, “She’s a CHEATER.”
The claims by Trump are completely fabricated — other video images from that day show the image in question was actual, and the crowd size of thousands greeting Harris at the airport was real.
Trump also claimed that a maintenance worker had acted as a whistleblower and said the image was fake, but no such worker actually exists.
Responding to these claims, Sanders said Trump was not acting “stupid,” but that his false statement had a purpose: to cast suspicion in the minds of his own supporters now, so they will be more likely to back up his falsehoods regarding supposed election irregularities following Election Day in November if he loses.
“When [Trump] claims that ‘nobody’ showed up at a 10,000-person Harris rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness,” Sanders said in a written statement. “Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses.”
If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent.’
“This is what destroying faith in institutions is about,” Sanders added. “This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about.”
In addition to trying to cast doubts about the sizes of crowds at Harris rallies in Detroit and elsewhere — and making bombastic claims that his own crowd sizes are larger than they actually are, but that the mainstream media supposedly won’t cover them — Trump and his presidential campaign have also claimed, without proof, that polling data showing Harris ahead of him, both nationally and in key swing states, are also fraudulent, with a spokesperson for the campaign stating that the polls are understating his support among voters “with the clear intent and purpose of depressing support” overall for Trump.
The attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the polling data isn’t really meant to complain about them per se, but rather “is simply meant to suggest that no measure of reality can be trusted unless it favors Trump,” The Washington Post’s Philip Bump said in a column this week.
“The point isn’t to increase Trump’s credibility. It’s to erode everyone else’s. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary,” Bump added.
Trump gave similar signals in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election that he would not accept the election results unless they showed he had won the White House for a second time. According to The Guardian’s Sam Levine, however, this year is different, for two key reasons. First, over the past several years, a number of Trump loyalists who harbor the same election denialist viewpoints have been appointed to local election boards across the country, making it more likely that errant and easily debunkable fraud claims will be taken seriously when they should not be; and second, the Republican National Committee’s legal arm, led by former Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, is poised to support Trump in his false election fraud claims more so than it did in 2020, with a virtual army of 100,000 poll watchers supporting their aims.
“While the law controls what Congress must do once it receives certificates from electors, it doesn’t have much to say about what must happen in the lead-up to the Electoral College vote,” Levine reported. “That could leave a lot of wriggle room for Trump and allies to try to slow down certification and go to court to try to force states to miss their certification deadline.”
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