When Donald Trump is at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened, he tells fans not to believe their own eyes and ears.
After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the event a love fest, denying the video evidence of the violence. After the writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual assault, he said he had never met her, despite a photo showing them together.
And yesterday, after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were fake and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theorytouted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsensethat the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo from her August 7 event in Romulus, Michigan.
Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? he wrote. There was nobody at the plane, and she A.I.d it, and showed a massive crowd of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDNT EXIST!
Read: Trump cant deal with Harriss success
The turnout at Harris events is entirely real, and political analysts suspect that the crowds she has attracted are making Trump jealous and nervous. But the AI lie is about more than Trumps size anxietyit portends a dark and desperate chapter in this already distressing presidential-election season.
Alex King, a 32-year-old political organizer who lives outside Detroit, was at the August 7 rally holding a Harris-Walz sign and wearing a blue shirt. He immediately recognized himself in the picture that Trump shared and pretended was fake yesterday. There was nobody there! Trump wrote. But King was there, and he told me the former presidents post was disheartening and frankly disrespectful.
Every time Trump challenges his fans to side with him over photographic proof of reality, its disrespectful. I have been keeping an informal list of such episodes since the inauguration-crowd-size controversy of 2017, and they are typically driven by Trumps enormous insecurity.
The first lie of the Trump presidency, as The Atlantics Megan Garber dubbed the inauguration freakout, began with a 5 a.m. segment on CNN the day after Trump was inaugurated. The CNN anchor John Berman very gently pointed out that Trump had predicted they were going to break records with the crowds in Washington, but it doesnt look like they did, and he showed a graphic juxtaposing Barack Obamas historic 2009 crowd on the left and Trumps smaller crowd on the right. Trump erupted, and his aides came up with alternative facts to deny reality.
Read: The first lie of the Trump presidency
Toward the end of his presidency, Trump minimized the crowd sizes at protests, claiming that Black Lives Matter drew a much smaller crowd in D.C. than anticipated when in fact a rally over the death of George Floyd in police custody was the largest gathering in the nations capital since the Womens March on the day after his inauguration.
More recently, during his hush-money trial in Lower Manhattan this spring, Trump was reportedly disappointed that his supporters did not flock to the area around the courthouse. He made excuses when reporters pointed out that the park across the street was practically empty. Thousands of people were turned away from the courthouse, he lied, calling the area an armed camp to keep people away. I pulled out my cameraphone to show how easy it was to visit the neighborhood, and told New Yorkers to come see for themselves.
But Trumps repeated claims that you shouldnt believe your own eyes have been buttressed by his near-decade-long insistence that real news is fake. A Trump devotee would have a hard time trusting my photo of the wide-open courthouse entrance over Trumps comforting lie.
I have come to view this as a method of control. The rejection of video evidence, the dismissal of photo proof, even the new lie invoking AIthese claims all leave people arguing over the most basic tenets of reality, and cause some people to give up and give in. As Chico Marx asked in the 1933 film Duck Soup, Who are ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes? Richard Pryor later adapted the line: Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes? Trump has brought the concept into the 21st century.
Some of his photo-denying disputes have been minor, and maybe even humorous. One day in 2019, The Washington Post reported that Trumps advisers wrote new talking points and handed him reams of opposition research for his attacks against the Democratic lawmakers known as the Squad. Trump claimed that there were no talking points even though a Post photographer, Jabin Botsford, had taken a close-up photo of his prepared notes.
Every instance of Trump disputing the indisputable is revealing in its own way. As Hurricane Dorian sideswiped the Eastern Seaboard, in the fall of 2019, Trump contradicted his own governments weather maps and claimed that Alabama was in the path of the hurricane when the state was not, then tried to convince people that his faulty forecast was correct. That same year, as Britains Prince Andrew was ensnared in sexual-misconduct allegations, Trump said I dont know him, no, despite multiple photos of the two men together, including one taken just six months before.
Vulnerability seems to be the through line herewhether Trump is at risk of trivial embarrassment, criminal exposure, or being caught in lies. A public figure with truth on their side would say Roll the tape to show theyre right. Trump, instead, says, Dont believe the tape. Just believe me instead.
The aftermath of January 6 is probably the most extreme example of his reality-denial. He watched the insurrection unfold on live TV but then tried to erase the publics memory of the images. On the one-year anniversary of the attack, Representative Jamie Raskin said on CNN that he felt bad for Trump adherents because they are essentially in a political religious cult, and their cult leader, Donald Trump, is telling them they cant believe their own eyes, the evidence of their own experience, and their own ears.
Thats what Trump did again yesterdayonly this time, the proliferation of AI-image-making tools made it easier than ever to sow doubt. Trump is entering the nothing is true and everything is possible phase, as predicted, the Atlantic contributor Renee DiResta wrote on Threads. The ability to plausibly cast doubt on the real is the unintended consequence of being able to generate unreality.
King, one of the real people in the Michigan crowd that Trump said didnt exist, found the new crowd-size lie dispiriting. It would be nice for us voters to be able to have discussions on the substantive issues that are at stake in this election, he told me, not be hyperfocused on distractions and conspiracy theories.
Yesbut it is also essential to track how Trump tries to trick people. His is a campaign of disbelief. If Trump is so shaken by Harris that he will insist her thousands of supporters dont exist, what else will he say and do to deny reality?
