For Donald Trump, size matters and Kamala Harris and her crowds are getting into his head

The unintended consequence of Vice President Kamala Harris drawing enormous crowds is the negative psychological impact it is having on former President Donald Trump, a man for whom size matters.

Who knew.

The people showing up in droves to back Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Tim Walz, her vice-presidential pick, by voting with their feet are demonstrating their collective power to drive Trump nuts.

No one could have planned this.

It is a naturally occurring "psyops" political play.

Psyops is the nickname the military and intelligence services use for psychological operations, ploys used to influence and manipulate people without them knowing it.

Neither impeachments nor indictments, not even the assassination attempt gets into Trump’s head as much as crowd sizes. It’s long been an obsession. On Jan. 20, 2017, the day Trump was inaugurated, he forced his press secretary to lie and say more people turned out to see him than President Barack Obama.

Trump uses crowd sizes for self-validation. They come, therefore I am.

And until now, with surging interest in the Harris-Walz ticket, he had a point. He is an enormous draw. His events attracted more people than routinely turned out for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2024.

It's true. Trump packs them in.

And so does Harris. Trump’s got a rival who is also a major draw. It’s getting to him.

In Michigan, Harris and Walz drew some 15,000 to a hangar at Detroit Metro Airport on Wednesday, the campaign said. Earlier that day, in Eau Claire, Wis., some 12,000 came to an outdoor rally, according to the campaign.

For the debut of the Democratic ticket on Tuesday in Philadelphia at Temple University’s Liacouras Center, news outlets put the crowd at over 10,000, filling the arena with an overflow crowd watching a simulcast at a hall across the street.

The Harris campaign, just over two weeks old, quickly seized on Trump’s major vulnerability — his fragile ego. They are exploiting it to mess with him and call him out.

The Harris team opened an account on Truth Social — Trump’s social platform of choice — and posted side-by-side pictures of Trump and Harris crowds at the same venues just to taunt him. The pictures showed turnout about the same. For Trump, that’s incomprehensible.

Trump at his Thursday press conference at Mar-a-Lago in Florida was asked about Harris’ crowd sizes and he went off on a rant that makes my point.

He made the bogus claim that the number of people he addressed at a D.C. rally on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day his backers attacked the Capitol to prevent Biden from becoming president — was as big or bigger as the crowd flooding the National Mall in 1963 for Dr. Martin Luther King's historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said, making the false assertion that on Jan. 6, “We actually had more people" than King did in 1963.

"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."

In reply the Harris campaign said in a statement, “People have spoken to bigger crowds than Donald Trump” naming Obama, Clinton and “literally anyone at Lollapalooza, Coachella, the World Cup.”

Last Saturday, at the Georgia State Convocation Center in Atlanta — where Harris packed them in a few days earlier — Trump complained that somehow her crowd numbers did not count “because she had entertainers” on the program.

I interviewed Barbie Zelizer, the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, about how Trump is consumed with crowd sizes.

Focusing on crowd size “is one of the most visible tools demagogues have,” she said.

Harris is “playing on the very devices Trump thought only he could deliver,” Zelizer said. Harris' success in pulling in people is a blow to Trump’s self-image and “of Trump’s ability to believe in himself.”

The Harris team, Zelizer said, “is playing his game and playing it better than he can play” and is “challenging Trump’s own perception of himself.”

Said Zelizer, the Harris success at galvanizing crowds — and the campaign taunting Trump about it — is their way of “showing the Emperor has no clothes.”