Former President Donald Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice-President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hour-long news conference in which he assailed Harris’ intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists.
Throughout the event, held in the main room at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump assailed the state of the US economy, described the country as in mortal danger if he did not win the presidential election and falsely described his departure from the White House — which was preceded by his refusal to concede his election loss in November 2020 and the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by a mob of his supporters — as a “peaceful” transfer of power.
Trump also flashed frustration when asked about the size of Harris’ crowds while boasting about the attendance at his own rally January 6, 2021. But he fixated on the size of the crowd that he initially gathered on the national mall, making comparisons to the one drawn by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not — we had more.”