Why Trump’s Claim His Jan. 6 Crowd Was Larger Than MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech Isn’t Just Wrong, It’s Racist
The crowd surrounds the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial for the 1963 Freedom March and to listen to Martin Luther King. | Source: Historical / Getty
At this point, it’s unclear what Donald Trump enjoys more: lying to his easily lied to MAGA supporters or gaslighting Black people. Fortunately for him, he doesn’t have to choose one or the other as he has proven time and time again he’s capable of doing both simultaneously.
On Thursday, Trump would have outdone himself when it comes to telling lies that are easily fact-checked and debunked if not for the fact that this is pretty much the only thing he ever does when he has a microphone at his disposal.
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This time, he erroneously claimed that the audience that attended his Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” speech in Washington, D.C., was equal to or larger than the audience that attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered during the equally iconic March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.
Trump on his January 6 speech: "Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours … we had more." pic.twitter.com/i9DL82vuLg
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 8, 2024
“I’ll tell you, it’s very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture— a small number of people, relatively, going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd,” Trump said in yet another transparent attempt at downplaying the act of domestic terrorism he inspired at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to — I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.”
Now, Trump could easily have stopped at that lie. After all, it’s not like his MAGA cultists will ever bother doing the roughly five minutes of research it would take to find a myriad of politicians, civil rights leaders and historical figures who have spoken to much larger crowds than he does on average (or ever). (Trump’s entire ego-hurt diatribe was prompted by him being asked if he is worried that Kamala Harris is currently drawing larger crowds than he is.) But Trump had to take things a step further by comparing his Jan. 6 crowd to that of MLK, who spoke in front of an audience that was so large you could fit Trump’s Jan. 6 audience neatly in the corner and no one would notice if not for the pungent stench of twice a month bathing, gun powder and salty white tears.
“But 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 to… from Lincoln to Washington,” Trump rambled on. “And you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd (and) my crowd, we actually had more people. They said I had 25,000 and he had a million people, and I’m OK with it because I liked Dr. Martin Luther King.
“If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech. And you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more.”
In all honesty, this display of cognitive delusion isn’t even worth the fact-check, but since we’re already here…
According to the New York Times, the National Park Service, Govinfo.gov, and generally anyone who has working eyes and/or access to media archives, Trump is wrong. Trump’s Jan. 6 speech drew a crowd of roughly 53,000 people, about half of which never attended the actual speech because they refused to allow themselves to be checked for weapons. (How many of those people do you think pretended to be outraged over the assassination attempt on their MAGA messiah?”
“From a tent backstage at the Ellipse, President Trump looked out at the crowd of approximately 53,000 supporters and became enraged,” the “187 minutes of dereliction” report stated. “Just under half of those gathered—a sizeable stretch of about 25,000 people—refused to walk through the magnetometers and be screened for weapons, leaving the venue looking half-empty to the television audience at home.”
By comparison, MLK’s speech was viewed live and in person by an estimated 250,000 people.
Again, the fact check wasn’t needed. Anyone who has ever seen a wide shot of the March on Washinton crowd knows how massive it was, and all Trump did was invite folks all over the internet to post side-by-side visuals of how loud and provably wrong he is (as usual).
Donald Trump just said that he had a bigger crowd on January 6 than Dr. Martin Luther King did when he delivered “I Have A Dream.”
…Not only is that completely false, but here’s what is more important: MLK’s speech was about democracy. Trump’s was about tearing it down. pic.twitter.com/cyjmztKy1Y
— NAACP (@NAACP) August 8, 2024
Trump: “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech and you look at ours, same real estate. You look at the picture of his crowd versus my crowd, we had more people.”
Here’s aerial shots of MLK’s March on Washington vs. Trump’s inauguration: pic.twitter.com/Hvog9EgNxP
— Andrew—Author of America Rises On Substack (@AmoneyResists) August 8, 2024
The real insult is that, out of all the false comparisons Trump could have made, he intentionally chose MLK’s most famous speech to juxtapose with the speech he gave, which prompted thousands of his audience members to walk over to the nation’s Capitol building and violently attempt to force legislators to make legally cast votes, largely from predominately Black precincts, illegitimate.
MLK spoke about unity, equality and Black liberation. Donald Trump wanted to bring Jim Crow back to the voting booth. MLK spoke about non-violent resistance. Trump’s MAGAts resorted to violence, not as a form of resistance, but as a form of white nationalist oppression. MLK wanted to get us to the mountaintop. Trump is only making regular trips to the very peak of Mt. Cuacasity.
King’s legendary and historic speech would never have been necessary in the first place if not for the systemic racism Trump, his constituents, right-wing media and the GOP repeatedly claim never existed, a narrative Republican lawmakers lean on to pass legislation banning efforts to correct America’s history of racism and systematic disenfranchisement. Yet, they all keep invoking his name when it’s politically convenient, and Trump even goes as far as to cite Black people’s complaints of injustice when trying to draw Black support by comparing our plight to his self-inflicted legal woes.
Trump won’t even let us get over his racist, condescending and generally abysmal performance at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ)—where he insulted Black journalists and Black women to their faces while whitesplaining to Black people about Harris’ racial identity—before playing around in our faces again by putting him, Jan. 6 and Martin Luther King Jr. in the same discussion.
Again, Trump’s pathological lying and perpetual displays of delusion are bad enough, but it’s the racist gaslighting that makes him the white nationalist monster we know him to be.
Trump isn’t MLK any more than he’s Nelson Mandela. In fact, he represents everything our most iconic civil rights leaders fought against.
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