When Donald Trump says something ludicrous and unhinged, it is often difficult to tell if he is acting out of feral political calculation or narcissistic injury. We saw this on Sunday, when he claimed that Kamala Harris had used A.I. to fake an image of an enthusiastic crowd greeting her when she arrived in Michigan.
“There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!,” Trump wrote on his vanity website Truth Social.
His argument, such as it was, was based on a conspiracy theory floating around febrile corners of the internet that purported to find evidence of Harris’s deception in her plane’s reflection. “Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches,” Trump added. “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING — And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”
One way to read this post is that Trump is delusional. He can’t cope with Harris besting him on the metric he’s long valued the most — the size of his audience — and so is denying reality and having a tantrum. But however disordered Trump’s mind might be, I suspect there’s also a sort of strategy at work here. He is helping his supporters build a rationale for rejecting the election results if Harris wins.
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Those who refuse to believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election often cite modest turnout at Biden rallies, or enormous audiences at Trump ones, as proof that the election was rigged. This was always an absurd argument; if there was a direct connection between crowd sizes and vote share, Bernie Sanders would have been a Democratic presidential nominee. But it felt true to the members of Trump’s base, who’ve convinced themselves that their movement represents the true expression of the national will.
Some Trump fans certainly understand that they constitute a numerical minority in this country. But others are cloistered enough to believe Trump when he insists that he is overwhelmingly beloved, as he did at his Mar-a-Lago news conference last week, when he claimed that the MAGA movement encompasses 75 percent of Americans. I doubt many people registered this lie, jammed as it was amid so many others. But some of his die-hard fans heard it and took heart. “You know if he’s saying that, he has the data to back it up,” said a post from a popular account on Truth Social. “Meaning this election is gonna be too big to rig.”
