President Trump's crowd-size estimates: Increasingly unbelievable

[highplainsdem]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/19/president-trumps-crowd-size-estimates-increasingly-unbelievable/

Trump has been inflating the size of his crowds since his early days as a candidate. His presidency began with a surreal national debate over how many people attended his inauguration.

And this year, at midterm campaign rallies across the country, the president’s crowd-size boasts became a big bugaboo for fact-checkers. There’s no question Trump can draw supporters by the thousands, but his pumped-up numbers are so extravagant most of the time that they have little or no basis in fact.

For example, Trump claimed 50,000 people were outside a rally in Houston because they couldn’t get in, but the city’s police chief said the number was much lower: 3,000. In Cleveland, Trump claimed “thousands” of people were outside because the venue was packed. But Twitter users at the event posted evidence that Trump didn’t fill the venue and that only a handful of people were milling around in the parking lot.

In Tampa, Trump claimed thousands of people who couldn’t get in were watching outside on a “tremendous movie screen” — that didn’t exist.

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We reconstructed as much as we could and compared Trump’s estimates of his crowd sizes this year with information from local media, law enforcement or attendees posting photos and videos on Twitter. Trump has held 44 rallies this year, but we focused only on 19 for which he gave some kind of estimate of the crowd size.

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[Crutchez_CuiBono]

1. When you are hiring the crowd via craigslist, you have a pretty good idea

how big the "crowd' is. This has been the ugliest 2 years of my late adult life.