Former president attacks Democratic rival in rambling press conference and complains media is favoring her
Struggling in the polls and charged with running a lackluster presidential campaign, Donald Trump faced reporters on Thursday for an hour-long press conference that swiftly descended into a familiar mess of freewheeling invective, outlandish claims and outright lies.
“Nobody was killed on January 6,” the former president and Republican presidential nominee said, of the day in 2021 when he incited an attack on Congress now linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides and the shooting by a police officer of Ashley Babbitt, who Trump voters widely claim as a martyr.
Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, Trump repeated his praise of rioters convicted and jailed in the hundreds, whom he has said he will pardon. Absurdly, he also said there was a “peaceful transfer” of power after he lost to Joe Biden.
But he seemed more exercised by the size of his audience.
“I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds,” Trump claimed, in just one complaint about the media supposedly exaggerating crowd sizes for his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, at his expense.
“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.”
Trump was comparing his speech on the Ellipse on 6 January 2021, when he told supporters to “fight like hell” in service of his lie about electoral fraud in his 2020 defeat, to King’s imperishable speech at the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963, a landmark of the civil rights era in which King outlined his dream of racial equality.
“They said I had 25,000 and he had a million people. And I’m OK with it, because I liked Dr Martin Luther King,” Trump said. It was an echo of Trump’s famous lies about the crowd size for his inauguration in 2017, compared to crowd sizes for Barack Obama. Analyses have found Trump’s crowd was not remarkable or comparable.
