Student of Civil Rights History Offers Trump Help In Comparing His Crowd Size With Dr. King’s
Dear Mr. Trump,
At a press conference on Thursday, you said that your crowds are bigger than anyone’s. Ever. Even bigger than Dr. Martin Luther King’s crowd for his “I Have A Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Amazing! Let me be the first to ever congratulate you.
As a civil rights attorney and writer, I am an avid student of civil rights history. I have read much about Dr. King, his speeches and protests, along with the landmark civil rights laws he advanced. On the one hand, I have never seen this comparison made before — holding up one of your rallies to an iconic civil rights event such as the 1963 March. On the other hand, you’ve made this claim with a conviction equal to the convictions in which you shared other stories, such as an emergency helicopter landing with Willie Brown.
Sorry about the multiple convictions, but the point is that I’m fascinated and would like to offer my help in giving this new crowd-size claim its proper footnote in the historical record.
For the project, I have some questions. First, which of your crowds do you want to hold up for comparison with Dr. King’s? After your relentlessly generous offerings of thoughts about Vice President Kamala Harris’ crowds appeared to have finally ended, a reporter had asked you whether you could honestly say that you had peacefully transferred power to then President-Elect Joe Biden. She reminded you of the January 6, 2021 insurrection that interrupted the counting of electoral votes by a joint session of Congress.
In a prodigious pivot, you reminded her of the size of the crowd for your speech on January 6, that same whipped-up crowd which later compensated for any allegedly smaller size by storming the Capitol and forcing everyone in Congress and their staff members to run for their lives.
Is that the crowd you want for this comparison? That’s a tough crowd. Poor Josh Hawley, for example, is still running scared from it, back and forth over the suddenly well-worn marble of the Capitol Building’s hallways and staircases.
My second question derives from your words at the press conference about a prior and apparently close examination of photographs of the crowds from 1963 and 2021:
“But when you look at the exact same pictures and everything’s the same because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to from Lincoln to Washington. And you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd, we actually had more people.”
The transcript’s attempt to follow your pattern of speech seems garbled, and I apologize. I will look for a more intelligible version. In the meantime, which pictures are you talking about? Could you provide them? I understand that these might be your personal copies but rest assured that I can interpret or work around any number of Sharpie modifications.
And then to get others to produce photographs, you just used a brilliant strategy. By pretending to unleash a conspiratorial rant about Vice President Harris using AI to enhance crowd photos from her rally in Michigan, you tricked thousands of Harris-Walz supporters into posting actual photos and video of that rally. You could make a similar accusation of Dr. King to help get more photos from 1963. Yes, I believe the ploy will work again because when you go on a conspiratorial rant, no one suspects it’s anything but.
You mentioned fountains, which leads me to the third question. Which fountains? This could be important because you seem to have found a new way of looking at the National Mall. The way the world has always understood it, at the conclusion of the March in 1963, the speakers such as Dr. King, John Lewis, and Daisy Bates spoke to the crowd from the Lincoln Memorial steps while facing toward the Washington Monument. On January 6, 2021, you spoke from the Ellipse south of the White House. Perhaps your next helicopter ride could help clarify this.
Fourth, I have read that you were ketchup-level upset on January 6 because many of your supporters had been prevented from attending the speech. With frustrating zeal, the Secret Service turned away any supporter who refused to go through magnetometers screening for possible weapons and pipe bombs along with other items such as gas masks, horned Viking helmets, and MAGA flagpoles. So, my next question is a request really, for your help in getting an accurate count of those detector-averse folks. The length of your anticipated Day One pardon list might help there.
Finally, context from the speeches themselves is illuminating. I’ve compared the words and purposes of your event and speech with Dr. King’s. You had directly invited your crowd to come protest the electoral vote confirmation by telling them in tweets to “Be there, will be wild!” and to fight.
On January 6, your attorney Rudy Giuliani warmed up the crowd for you by saying, “Let’s have a trial by combat!” You then delivered what some have called your “I Have A Scheme” speech. (For this project, I’ll try to not get distracted by your detractors’ sharp sense of humor.) You urged the crowd to march down to the Capitol Building with you and “stop the steal”. To your credit, you did the Secret Service a solid when you ghosted your mob and instead watched them pillage Congress from the safety of the White House.
Back in 1963, by contrast, Dr. King marched with his crowd and then shared with the people his vision for America’s future with unmatched eloquence and with a purpose that eventually led to the passage of three landmark civil rights laws: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy,” Dr. King urged, instead of threatening democracy.
“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline,” he said. “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.”
And then, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”
Just as an aside, Mr. Trump, and you may have had the same troubling thought when you read Dr. King’s words and poured over the crowd photographs from the March for Jobs and Freedom. But it seems like it was a beautiful sunny August day along the National Mall and around the Reflecting Pool in 1963. And among the 250,000 people there, a sense of hope, optimism, and purpose brimmed that we see again with the crowds following Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
All this leading to that troubling thought: Perhaps hope, optimism and purpose are artificially inflating (the other AI) the crowd sizes for everyone but you.
Someone should look into it!
Please let me know about the photographs.
Yours truly,
Gary Rhoades
