Size of Kamala Harris’ crowds is rattling Donald Trump

Atlanta: When former US president Donald Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in Atlanta on Saturday, fog machines shot white plumes of smoke into the air, heralding his arrival.

If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapours.

“Crazy Kamala,” he fumed a minute into his speech. “She was here a week ago – lots of empty seats – but the crowd she got was because she had entertainers.”

Four days earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had packed about the same number of people (10,000) into the arena, the Georgia State University Convocation Centre. It was the first major rally of her newborn campaign, and she had two rappers (Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion) on hand to hype up her crowd.

Trump, who has been shunned by much of the entertainment industry, spun this as somehow cheating in the all-important competition over crowd size.

“I don’t need entertainers,” he said on Saturday. “I fill the stadium because I’m making America great again.”

The numbers game has long been of paramount importance for Trump. As a reality television star, he was obsessed with ratings. (“What is it about me that gets Larry King his highest ratings?” he wrote in one of his books.) This only intensified once he entered politics. He spent his first full day in office as president trying to convince the news media that his inauguration crowd was larger than the Women’s March the day before. (It was not.)

The crowds he has drawn to his rallies this campaign season have been as big as ever. Whether in blistering heat or deep freeze, his supporters line up for hours beforehand to see him. Trump’s previous two rivals, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, could never compete with him on this front. What will it mean if his new challenger can?

Harris’ rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday, when she is expected to unveil her running mate, is likely to be a blowout. After that, she’s going on tour, holding rallies in western Wisconsin; Detroit; Raleigh, North Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Phoenix; and Las Vegas. It’s all starting to screw with Trump’s psyche.

In Atlanta, his surrogates reassured everyone that he was still the hottest ticket in town. “I can feel the energy – whew,” said Republican congressman Mike Collins. “The freakin’ lines are longer this time. The crowds are larger this time.”

Burt Jones, Georgia’s lieutenant governor, said: “There’s still people piling in right now. It’s unbelievable.”

Still, Trump couldn’t help but focus on those who weren’t piling in. He claimed that Georgia State University officials in charge of the arena prevented him from letting in more people. “We have beautiful cameras set up for the overflow crowds,” he said. A massive screen flashed to a live video feed of his red-capped supporters milling around outside in the 90-degree heat.

In Trump’s telling, this wasn’t a safety protocol but a conspiracy to humiliate him, perpetrated by the university and other nefarious forces. It all connects, in his estimation, to the biggest numbers game he has ever lost. “If they’re going to stand in the way of admitting people to our rally, just imagine what they’re going to do on election day,” he said.

This goes to the core of Trump’s crowd-size fixation. He seems to believe that a full arena is a predictor of his ultimate victory – as if the voters in that arena were representative of the country at large. In his first presidential campaign, Trump’s sizable rallies were evidence of a swell of support the political establishment didn’t understand.

“Look at the love and adulation – this is like a poll,” he said in one revealing moment in Atlanta. “We have thousands of people. That’s better than going out and paying a half a million dollars to have some pollster go out and poll 212 people.”

Thirty minutes into his speech, he became distracted again by the seating: “There’s some seats right up there – they could let them come in.”

He complained about the venue to Republican representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who was sitting in the front row. “It’s obviously, Marjorie, a very liberal school, I guess, right? I’m not happy with the school.” He claimed that “they don’t want to show that we’re successful”.

And then he was back, once again, on Harris and her crowd size. “She has to go get entertainers,” he repeated. “They start leaving as soon as she opens her mouth.”

This seemed like pure projection. If 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.

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 Trump’s mug shot tiptoed up their aisle a minute later.

A young woman led her family away just as Trump started to falsely tell them that “Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who murdered Laken Riley”. Riley, 22, was a nursing student who was killed in Georgia in February by, according to authorities, a Venezuelan migrant who had entered the country illegally and had been released on parole.

This happens at every rally, to a degree. And it is more a factor of the time commitment involved than any sort of discontent with his message. Supporters show up, get their photos for Facebook of the man in the arena and, at some point during his discursive stem-winders, decide that they’ve heard enough and that it’s time to go eat.

Still, an hour into Trump’s speech, the Atlanta crowd had emptied out more than usual. (Like Madonna, he often keeps his crowds waiting for an hour or more past the scheduled start time, which doesn’t help the situation.) Large splotches of blue had blossomed across the upper stands, and people on the floor had started to sneak away, too.

Trump’s most faithful followers were also feeling defensive about the duelling rally discourse on Saturday.

“I think there was just a little bit of hype for her as she first comes out, but I think that’s going to die out,” said Mark Adent, 57, executive vice president of a printing company in Atlanta.

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But there was something about Harris’ star turn at the same arena that had unsettled Trump. He seemed to be pining for the glory days of his first campaign, back when his rollicking rallies were but a harbinger of a stunning victory to come. He said that seeing two rappers open for Harris reminded him of how Hillary Clinton used musicians to help summon the kinds of crowds he could command with ease.

“She got the idea from Hillary,” he told his supporters. “Hillary got Bruce Springsteen, I’ll never forget, and the place was pretty full.

“Not full like our places are full,” he added quickly. “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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.