Donald Trump claims crowds at Kamala Harris rally are fake despite 'no evidence' photo was manipulated

Around 15,000 supporters were estimated to have gathered in Detroit as Harris looks to shore up support to carry Michigan.

The footage, which included Air Force One in the background, showed a large number of excited Harris supporters welcoming the Democratic duo to the Great Lake State.

Taking his tirade against Harris to Truth Social, Trump said: “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?

“There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘AI’d’ it, and showed a massive 'crowd' of so-called followers,

“BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror-like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.

“She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. 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. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”

The 45th President added: “Look, we caught her with a fake ‘crowd’. There was nobody there!”

Fact check website Snopesclaimed that the Winston AI Detector determined the image was “96 per cent human”, making it “likely photographed by someone and not created using an AI-generation tool”.

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Snoopes also concluded that “it’s possible that [the photograph's] lighting, shadows or filtering was digitally manipulated” but not the photo as a whole.

Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnick has also defended his photograph.

“It was a large crowd, and the pictures that I took that are on the Getty website speak to that,” he told Daily Beast.

Harris later hit back against Trump, doubling down on claims that 15,000 people turned up.

“1) This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” the campaign posted on social media. “2) Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week... Low energy?”

Trump was already accused of rambling during a press conference in which he voiced frustration about Harris attracting 12,000 supporters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, last week.

Nibbling to comments about Harris' rally, Trump said: “Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me.

“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 have more.

“And they say he had a million people but I had 25,000 people. When you look at the exact same picture, and everything’s the same because it was the foundations, the whole thing, all the way back from Lincoln to Washington.

“You look at it and you look at the picture, his crowd, my crowd, we actually had more people.”

In a press release, the Harris campaign described Trump “the most insecure man in America.”

Despite leading in a number of opinion polls before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Trump is now struggling against Harris.

The latest Siena College poll put Harris on 46 per cent, with Trump narrowly behind on 44 per cent.

Siena College also put Harris ahead in the three key Rust Belt states.

However, Trafalgar Group handed Trump the advantage in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina, leaving the contest on a knife-edge.

Polling aggregator website RealClearPolitics hands Harris an advantage that Biden struggled to pull off throughout 2024.

However, the 0.5 per cent margin is significantly lower than the 7.5 per cent lead Biden had in 2020 and 6.3 per cent lead Hillary Clinton opened up in 2016.