“MLK’s speech was about democracy. Trump’s speech was about tearing it down,” the NAACP said after Donald Trump compared the size of the crowd at the January 6, 2021 rally to MLK’s historic March on Washington.
Former President Donald Trump is comparing photos on social media and looking to the history books after claiming the crowd at his “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, was larger than the estimated 250,000 people who attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.
Trump made the comparison on Thursday during a press conference at his Mar-A-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
“I’ll tell you, it’s very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture — a relatively small number of people walking to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd,” the Republican presidential candidate said of the 2021 crowd, some of which preceded the storming of the U.S. Capitol. “The largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to — I’ve spoken to the largest crowds. Nobody has spoken to larger crowds than I have.”
Trump then compared the crowd at his rally to the number of people present at the revolutionary civil rights activist’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963.
“If you look at Martin Luther King when he gave his speech, his big speech, and you look at ours, same property, same everything, same number of people, if not, we had more,” Trump said. “They said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.”
“But if you look at the exact same picture, and everything is the same, because it was the fountains, the whole thing, all the way back to … from Lincoln to Washington. And if you look at it, and you look at the picture of his people (and) my people, we were actually more people. They said I had 25,000 and he had a million people, and I’m OK with that because I liked Dr. Martin Luther King.”
How many people attended the “Stop the Steal” rally?
The House select committee investigating the events of January 6 estimated that Trump’s speech attracted 53,000 supporters.
“From a tent behind the stage at the Ellipse, President Trump looked out over the crowd of about 53,000 supporters and became angry,” the report, “187 Minutes of Dereliction of Duty,” said. “Nearly half of those in attendance – a sizable group of about 25,000 people – refused to go through the magnetometers and be searched for weapons, leaving the venue looking half empty to the television audience at home.”
“Please more Trump in front of the microphone”
Several X users, including Andrew Wortman, shared posts comparing aerial shots of the two crowds side by side.
Others, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, responded to Trump’s claims about X with skepticism.
“He compares the crowd he gathers on TV to that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Lemon said in a video he posted on X. “He really has a dream, a fever dream.”
Jim Messina, a political adviser who served as White House deputy chief of staff for operations under former President Barack Obama, shared an X-post saying, “More Trump on the mic, please.”
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) responded to Trump’s claims about X, saying: “Donald Trump just said he had a bigger crowd in front of him on January 6th than Dr. Martin Luther King when he recited ‘I Have A Dream.’ … Not only is that completely false, but more importantly, MLK’s speech was about democracy. Trump’s speech was about tearing it down.”
Tabie Germain, another X user, posted about Trump’s possible confusion between the Million Man March on October 16, 1995, and the March on Washington.
“Trump compares himself to MLK … and then confuses the Million Man March with the March on Washington,” Germain said.
