Trump Claims Bigger Crowd Sizes Than MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech. Spoiler Alert: He’s Wrong, Delusional And Racist

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You know what…

At this point, President Donald Trump’s racism is more annoying than it is offensive. That’s not a good thing, of course, as it only underscores how normalized both his intentional and unintentional bigotry are, just as his buffoonish behavior and endless stream of propaganda have been. But Trump has spent the last couple of months — and most of the last year and a half, for that matter — absolutely spiraling, with his social media posts and public appearances revealing the extent of his insecurity and outright rage over his abysmal approval ratings, which continue to fall, and the daily stockpile of humiliating media headlines plaguing his administration.

So, when Trump, for at least the second time, makes a comically false comparison between his crowd sizes and those of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., it should make Black people’s blood boil, but also — it’s just really amusing watching this sad, lonely little man desperately stroke his comically fragile ego, while not possessing the self-awareness to understand how transparent it is that he’s just begging people to like him.

On Thursday, Trump was at the White House talking about fixing up the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, when he randomly began talking about the size of the crowd that came to see him deliver a speech during his July 4th celebration last year, laughably comparing it to the crowd size MLK had during his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The Lincoln Memorial has a beautiful reflecting pond, lake, they call it a pool, lake, and pond. But the word ‘reflecting’ is a good term,” Trump began. “It was built in 1922, and it was built out of granite and various stones on the bottom, and it never looked great because it’s not really meant to be a stone that’s underwater for that much of a period of time. It’s about a foot-and-a-half to two feet deep. You all know it well. That’s where Martin Luther King gave his great speech, and he had a million people, and I had the same exact crowd, maybe a little bit more.” 

You see what I mean?

I want to be upset at Trump for invoking MLK like this, but I just watched him go from being observably confused about what the differences are between ponds, lakes, and pools to offering up his architectural expertise about how long stone can breathe underwater, or whatever. Trump is the Mr. Magoo of Bull Connors. I hate him, but I also have to make sure I’m not swallowing water when he speaks, because it’s coming out through my nose every time.

“But they said I had 25,000 people on July 4. I have pictures of Martin Luther King’s crowd, my crowd, everything, but it was 70 years difference,” Trump continued while holding up a printed photo, presumably, of his July 4 crowd size. “The exact same crowd, but I actually had more people, but that’s okay. They gave him a million people. They said a million people. I had 25,000 people…on July 4th.”

Look, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently revealed that neither he nor his president knows how to do basic math, so it’s not terribly surprising that Trump is having a little trouble understanding how numbers work, even if the numbers he stated were correct, which they were not.

First, most estimates put MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech audience at around 250,000 people, not “a million.” Trump might be confusing that speech with the Million Man March, which took place at the National Mall in 1995, 27 years after MLK was assassinated. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised that all Black speeches look alike to President “Look at my African American over here” Trump.

Either way, though — whether MLK stood before 1 million people or a quarter of a million — his crowd size dwarfed that of the roughly 25,000 people who came to watch Trump babble incoherently and drool over a microphone for 20 minutes or so.

In 2024, when he was still campaigning to get his rust-orange butt shavings all over the Oval Office furniture again for a second term, Trump was asked if he was worried that former VP Kamala Harris was drawing larger crowds than he was, and he responded by getting visibly flustered and erroneously boasting that the crowd he drew on Jan. 6, 2021 — referring to the speech that, along with the months he spent spreading “stop the steal” propaganda, inspired the Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol — was larger than the crowd at MLK drew for that same “I Have a Dream” speech the president is still weirdly obsessed with now.

“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 at the time. “The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to — I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.”

“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 continued. “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.”

Again, with the 25,000 vs. “a million” thing — only for a completely different speech of his. And, once again, both numbers were wrong anyway. According to the New York Times, the National Park Service, Govinfo.gov, roughly 53,000 people were present during Trump’s Jan. 6 speech, which is more than double the number he thought he had, but still roughly 200,000 shy of what he would’ve needed to go crowd size for crowd size with the King.

Anyway, it’s still all very offensive because of the way Trump repeatedly claims “Black people love Trump,” while his anti-DEI, anti-civil rights, and anti-Black history policies do nothing but harm to our communities. We don’t love him, and he certainly doesn’t love us, so he really does need to keep Martin Luther King Jr.’s name out of his sphincter-shaped mouth.

Still, the fact that he’s this desperate for adoration that he’s pathetically grasping at straws like this, at the very least, makes it satisfying to watch.

Not as satisfying as it would be to see him out of office and behind somebody’s prison bars, but still.

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