Size matters, and it matters to Donald Trump more than most. Trump kicked off his presidency by exaggerating the modest turnout at his inauguration; now, he’s desperate to diminish the crowds showing up for his 2024 opponent.

Over the weekend, the former president posted on Truth Social a typically unhinged rant about the large crowds at Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent rallies. But instead of simply attributing the high turnout to guest spots from the likes of Megan Thee Stallion, as he has done previously, Trump went a step further and claimed Harris’s campaign is using AI to digitally forge huge crowds. (As proof, he offered a tweet from a right-wing strategist, which has since been community-noted into oblivion.) Trump’s claim has sent an unmistakable signal to supporters not to trust their lying eyes about Harris’s surging popularity, and the message quickly resonated on TikTok. It’s something both he and those supporters may soon come to regret.

Well before Trump’s weekend post on Truth Social, he has been openly obsessed with the robust turnout at Harris’s rallies. He spent an ill-advised chunk of time last week reiterating the size of his own crowds at a hastily assembled press conference, culminating in a pants-on-fire claim that the attendance at his January 6, 2021, speech dwarfed the crowds that turned out for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.

Now Trump is talking about how he drew a bigger crowd at Jan. 6 than MLK Jr. — just in case you want to know how this is going. pic.twitter.com/8mtSbuBtNZ

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 8, 2024

The escalation of accusing Harris of digitally manipulating a crowd photo is just the latest, and perhaps most significant, proof of how much the Democrat pivot from President Biden to VP Harris has upended Trump’s campaign.

Until just recently, the difference in crowd size between the candidates at the top of each ticket was a red-hot data point confirming a substantial enthusiasm gap. Biden was not exactly packing out his sparse campaign events, even before the disastrous debate performance that prompted his exit from the race. In contrast with Trump supporters, many of whom are demonstrably fired up about their candidate, a CBS/YouGov poll from June found that a majority of Democratic voters were mainly fired up about defeating Trump. Lackluster support for Biden himself made it easy for Trump to claim, yet again, that the only way he could lose would be if his opponent cheated.

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel back in May. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

Fox News echoed Trump’s suspicions of imminent cheating as Biden continued to drag down the prospects of a Democrat victory, with host Greg Gutfeld asking in June: “If by some weird, miraculous chance [Biden wins,] how do you convince anyone that’s real?”