Trump Is Bragging Again That He Got A Bigger Crowd In 2019 Than MLK's 'I Have A Dream' Speech Did—And The Delusion Is Staggering

President Donald Trump's delusions are off the charts given he's claiming he had more people in the crowd for his Salute to America July 4th event in 2019 than the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had for his famous I Have a Dream speech that he gave during the 1963 March on Washington.According to the National Park Service, roughly 260,000 people participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The demonstration brought together a largely Black but broadly diverse coalition of Americans demanding an end to racial discrimination and equal rights for Black citizens. The march is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, helping build momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by increasing pressure on President John F. Kennedy and federal lawmakers to act.Trump was bragging about the renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—now filled with algae, by the way—when he made the following statements:That's where Martin Luther King made his great speech, and they say he had a million people, and I made a speech there for July 4th, a few years ago. They said—and I was packed—and I had 25,000 people, they said, 'He had a million.'But when you look at the picture, I said, 'People are even tighter at mine.' I had more people than him but they said I had 25,000 and he had a million, but I'm not going to argue with Martin Luther King.You can hear what he said in the video below. Trump has made a similar claim before.During the 2024 campaign, he claimed the crowd that came to hear him speak ahead of the January 6 insurrection was the largest he had ever addressed, drawing a comparison to the crowd that gathered for King's speech.He claimed they said he had a million people but I had 25,000 people and when you look at the exact same picture—and everything's the same because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, you look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd, we actually had more people.The Harris campaign later took him to task for these statements, noting that he hasn't campaigned all week and isn't going to a single swing state this week. The campaign added that facts were hard to track and harder to find in Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago meltdown this afternoon.And just a few weeks ago, during an April press conference in the Oval Office, Trump, discussing the renovations to the Reflecting Pool, noted that it was where King delivered his iconic speech.Trump then revisited his longstanding claim about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, saying King had drawn about a million people and asserting that his own crowd was roughly the same size, maybe a little more.The delusion is staggering. Trump's preoccupation with crowd size has garnered him significant ridicule, perhaps most infamously after he quibbled over the size of the crowd that attended his inauguration in 2017.Trump—often through embattled former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer—openly disputed reports about the size of the crowd that attended his inauguration ever since the National Park Service (NPS) retweeted a post contrasting the crowd size at Trump's inauguration with the much larger crowd at former President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration.A report released in June of that year by the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior concluded that NPS officials did not alter records of crowd sizes at the inauguration ceremony and that all witnesses that were interviewed denied that staff had been instructed to alter records for the inauguration or to remove crowd size information.