The GSA Convocation Center in Atlanta. Image: GSU website.
The GSA Convocation Center in Atlanta. Image: GSU website.
Trump is more and more obsessed with crowd size these days. Could be because Kamala Harris filled the same venue in Atlanta that he didn't. But there was no shortage of people he decided to blame for it.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

Image: KamalaHQ X Account
Trump spent several minutes of his unhinged speech on Saturday attacking Georgia State University because, according to him, they prevented some of the MAGA faithful from entering his rally at the school’s Convocation Center. Waving his arms around at the partially filled arena, Trump complained, “The school administration stopped us from getting another 500, 600, maybe a thousand people in here. Thousands of people were told no, but that’s okay,” Trump said. “There’s some seats right up there—they could let them come in.”
Days earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had packed the same arena to its 10,000 capacity, but that was because “she had entertainers, and they all started to leave about ten minutes into the speech,” Trump lied. Nobody left Harris’ rally. Trump is obsessed with the size of his rally crowds, exaggerating their numbers repeatedly.
Even his complaint that the college was to blame for not letting some people into the rally was a lie. The Secret Service and local law enforcement were in charge of admitting people into the rallies held at the Atlanta venue, both Harris’ and Trump’s. The fact that Trump began his speech more than an hour late on a day that temperatures in Atlanta exceeded 90 degrees might have sent some people packing, but you didn’t hear that from Trump.
“If Mr. Trump had looked up from his teleprompter at any point during the second half of his 90-minute speech, he would have seen his own supporters slipping out of their bright blue seats, headed for the exits,” The New York Times reported today. “Slowly but surely, across every stand and in every section, they streamed out. Stage left, a man in a star-spangled cowboy hat sidled down his row at the halfway mark. Two men holding signs bearing Mr. Trump’s mugshot tiptoed up their aisle a minute later. A young woman led her family away just as Mr. Trump started to falsely tell them that ‘Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who murdered Laken Riley.’”
Trump continued to complain about how the size of his crowd had been constrained, apparently by a liberal conspiracy of Democratic Party female leaders. Speaking of Vice President Harris, Trump complained, “She got the idea from Hillary. Hillary got Bruce Springsteen, I’ll never forget, and the place was pretty full. Not full like our places are full,” Trump bragged. “I don’t have a guitar. But our places are bigger—we get more people than anybody. I don’t care how many guitars they have.”
He slurred his words, intentionally mispronounced “Kamala,” accused her of everything but the tornados that have roared through the Midwest. But the seats were empty in the Atlanta arena were because he doesn’t have a guitar.
He’d better get Alina Habba, one of his gaggle of incompetent lawyers who for some reason has been speaking at all of his recent rallies, to find him one, and fast.
There are 92 days to go until the election, and Donald Trump is runnin’ scared.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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