Trump Boasts About Crowd Sizes as Death Toll Nears 160,000

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As the number of Americans who’ve died from the novel coronavirus nears 160,000, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to boast about crowd sizes.

“My visits last week to Texas and Florida had massive numbers of cheering people gathered along the roads and highways, thousands and thousands, even bigger (by far) than the crowds of 2016,” the president wrote. “Saw no Biden supporters, and yet some in the Fake News said it was an equal number. Sad!”

Footage from when Trump landed in Tampa, Florida on Friday shows only a small crowd met him.

Likewise Texas.

The president’s preoccupation with crowd size dates has garnered him significant ridicule, perhaps most infamously after he quibbled over the size of the crowd that attended his inauguration in 2017.

A report released in June of that year by the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior concluded that National Park Service (NPS) officials did not alter records of crowd sizes at the inauguration ceremony.

“We did not find evidence to substantiate any of these allegations. All of the witnesses we interviewed denied that the NAMA official instructed staff to alter records for the inauguration or to remove crowd size information,” the report reads.