The very first lie from the Drumpf White House was about crowd size…. this is no accident. The giant Obama rallies in 2008, the endless polls showing 60% support for marriage equality & single payer healthcare, and the 1.8 Million people cheering Obama’s inauguration, all of it drove home to Republicans that they were the minority.
There was a moment this election season where Drumpf could have been stopped. It was back in August of 2015. The Bernie Sanders had just had two back to back 28k+ stadium filling rallies with overflow crowds outside. The media, however, could not stop it’s 24/7 coverage of every drop of verbal diarrhea that spewed from Donald Drumpf’s face. But people were starting to ask: “Bernie Sanders has a real grassroots movement going where’s the coverage?” Up to this point, Trump’s largest rally had been in a 4k rally in a Ballroom in AZ and on the coattails of Sherif Joe Arpaio who had a legion of few thousand rabid xenophobe followers who “hated’dem some wet backs”. Drumpf needed a big show of force to seize the populist mantle. Now, I had subscribed to Drumpf’s mail-list to get early notice of the crazy coming down the pike. So when I saw an email coming across that said “40K to rally in Mobile AL” I said to myself “OK this is when Drumpf jumps the shark.” The paid actors at his announcement, the claiming that the AZ ballroom rally was 20k people when the fire marshal & venue claimed the rooms standing room only capacity was 4k (and that number was counted at the door), this AL event would be a crushing and colossal failure. There was no way Drumpf would fill a Stadium. Even in heavily Xenophobic and racist Mobile AL. So I tuned in that day to watch the shit show about to unfold: a half empty stadium and Trump with egg on his face. After all the hype and 24/7 media coverage, he’d be losing to Bernie Sanders who was getting 1/16 the media coverage.
A few days before I wrote about Drumpfs coming disaster: www.dailykos.com/…
I tuned into the live steam of the rally from WKRG in AL at 6:40. Now the Eventbrite invite from the campaign said doors at 5PM and Speakers from 7-8:30pm (in line with Drumpf’s usual “early to bed early to rise” schedule), and from the few glimpses I could see of the stadium... it’s mostly empty. I couldn’t find archive of full steam of the event but a Trump fan video shows the scene at 6:40pm : Flyover Video
So it’s 20 minutes from the start of rally and stadium is mostly empty. Now, I’m laughing my ass off as I imagine Donny freaking out at his staff as he looks down at his impending shit show as he circles the stadium in Drumpf Force 1.
He circles the near empty stadium 3 times…. why? I’m willing to bet he was gaming an emergency abort excuse while talking over the situation with his staff. Eventually Drumpf lands, the staff crushes all the media and crowd into one end of the stadium and the rally does not start until after sunset nearly 9pm. A 2-hour scramble to get as many heads into the stadium as possible. Finally, Donald takes the stage to 18k at best. He's lost. Bernie is scoring 28k consistently with no media coverage. Bernie’s having much more diverse rallies anywhere and everywhere.
Here’s the full speech pay close attention to the first thing Drumpf talks about: Speech
“we had a hotel. And we were going to have about 250 or 300 people. And the hotel was great. They called this, it is something is happening here. We can't hold this. This is crazy what is going on. And then, we want to the convention center and they can have 10,000 people. And we are all set. We are excited. And the next day they said too many people we can't put them in. So we came here. We came here.
You know, today if you notice we have a stock market not doing so well. We have a country not doing so well.” Followed by 50 minutes of typical Drumpf lies and BS
Notice here no “Wow look at all these people!” no request to get a campaign staffer or media to take a panorama of the 40k people in the 43k capacity arena. The campaign didn’t spread the crowd out to fill the stadium and revel in their victory over Bernie. They were allegedly seizing the populist mantle with the largest rally of the campaign season. Just “Well this was bigger than we initially planned, more than 10k! Amazing!” CNN pegged the crowd at a generous 18-20k Local WKRG pegged it at 18k
So I laughed and reveled in the fact that the talking heads would have to start covering Bernie now. How could they continue to ignore and discount Sanders, the only one in the race with a positive favorable rating and the one who’d ignited the largest wave of energy since Obama, while the guy they're obsessing over can't get 20k in his most xenophobic deep red stronghold?
Then I felt it turning. One by one the major news outlets gave Drumpf the keystone upon which he could build his campaign. Only one MSM reporter (Katy Tur) bothered to leave the media pen and take a wide photo of the mostly empty stadium
And one by one the MSM outlets made the calculation: Drumpf vs Clinton will be a cash cow of scandal & tabloid sensationalism, but to maintain their credibility as news organizations, they would have to allow Drumpf the “Populist” mantle. After all, Clinton was going to win anyway. There would be a glorious smashing of the glass ceiling with fireworks exploding above the Hudson. The first African American president would be followed by the first Woman president. The story line was too perfect. So what harm would it cause to give trump his fake crowd totals.
Kill two birds with one stone; get rid of the old coot who has the gall to want to drone on about policy and issues, and prop up a dramatic foil for the obvious victor.
How’d that work out?
Flash forward to today. The myth of the “Trump Movement” is just accepted. His AL rally is now grown 40k, and not just in Drumpf’s brain.
Watch 23:00 on www.msnbc.com/…
Nobody, even on MSNBC, bothers to challenge Trumps 40k in AL lie, in fact the entire MTP panel repeats it. The myth has become reality.
While it seems trivial the myth that Drumpf was drawing the biggest crowds allowed moderates to believe their fictional “silent majority” was awakened and gave them renewed hope that their world view was prevalent. Drumpf became a viable candidate 8/21/2015 thanks to the media’s willful sandbagging of Bernie.
The image on the right side of the twitter pic above is what a movement looks like. The image on the left is the result of a poisoned well. You do not have a “movement” when lose the popular vote and voter turnout is way down. Every time you see a reporter or pundit opine on the “Trump movement”, or repeat a fake crowd total it’s incumbent on us to correct them.