Trump claims 'tens of thousands' unable to get into outdoor rally on National Mall
Fact-checkers have had to correct Trump’s lies about crowd sizes many times.
In a speech at the anti-abortion March for Life rally on Friday, Donald Trump claimed “tens of thousands” were unable to attend his speech due to excessive crowding.
“And to make you feel even better, there are tens of thousands of people outside that we passed on the way in,” said Trump. “If anybody would like to give up their spot, we can work that out.”
But the National Mall, where the speech was held, is able to hold many hundreds of thousands more people than the March for Life has ever been able to attract, calling into question Trump’s claim.
Fox News reported that attendance for past March for Life rallies has been as high as 400,000 to 650,000. Organizers claimed that the 2019 march had between 200,000 to 300,000 attendees. That’s much less than the capacity of the National Mall.
In 1965, 1.2 million attended the inauguration of President Lyndon Johnson after his landslide election victory. One million came for the bicentennial fireworks display in 1976.
Trump’s 2017 inauguration attracted between 300,000 to 600,000 people, about one-third of the 1.8 million who attended President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
For Trump’s claim to be true, more people would have had to attend the March for Life rally than his own inauguration. But it’s likely that didn’t happen.
On Wednesday Trump claimed, “with me there’s no lying.” But fact-checkers have cataloged him lying at least 15,000 times while holding his office.
On several occasions, those lies were easily disproved claims about the crowd size at Trump’s events.
For instance, in February, the El Paso, Texas, fire department publicly debunked Trump’s claim that 35,000 people were at his rally in the city. The fire department told a local newspaper that the capacity for the arena where Trump appeared was in fact 6,500.
Further calling into question Trump’s statement is the fact that the National Mall is an open-air outdoor venue. There is no “outside” where would-be rallygoers would be stuck and unable to hear him attack abortion rights.
It is all “outside.”
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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