On Jan. 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters to “fight” and walk to the U.S. Capitol to pressure leaders not to certify Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. His speech preceded a violent assault on the Capitol.
Almost six decades earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that called for racial harmony and civil rights for Black Americans.
Now, Trump says the two Washington, D.C., speeches share something else in common: crowd size.
During his Aug. 8 Mar-a-Lago press conference that touched on myriad topics, Trump claimed there was a “peaceful transfer” of power when he left office in 2021. Biden was sworn in as president under heavy security, but the effort to stop the counting of electoral votes two weeks before was unprecedented and brutal.
When a reporter challenged Trump’s “peaceful transfer” framing, Trump answered that “nobody was killed on Jan. 6,” which is also wrong. Trump then pivoted to his own remarks to supporters that day on the White House Ellipse, which is on the South Lawn, facing the Washington Monument.
“And, you know, it’s very interesting, the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to, and I said ‘peacefully and patriotically,’ which nobody wants to say,” Trump said. (Trump also told the crowd on the Ellipse to “fight.”)
Then he said:
“The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to, and you’ve seen Maggie (Haberman, a New York Times reporter), I was in at the mall. I was at the Washington Monument. I was at the whole thing. I had crowds. I don’t know who’s ever had a bigger crowd than I have, but I had it many times. The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken before was that day, and I’ll tell you, it’s very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture of a small number of people, relatively, going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd.
“The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken. I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds, nobody’s 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 had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people. But when you look at the exact same picture, and everything’s the same, because it was the fountains, the whole thing — all the way back 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. They said I had 25,000 and he had a million people, and I’m OK with it because I like Dr. Martin Luther King.”
A PolitiFact reader asked us to fact-check Trump’s comparison with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington.
The evidence shows Trump’s Ellipse speech was much smaller than the packed National Mall for King’s address.
A close listener might pick up that Trump offered imagery about the location that doesn’t line up with Trump’s Jan. 6 “Save America” rally, such as that it happened on “the mall,” and stretched “from Lincoln to Washington.” Those details line up with the Trump administration’s July 4, 2019, “Salute to America,” which attracted a larger crowd to the mall. Trump may have conflated the events, and the Trump campaign did not respond to our requests to clarify.
In recent years, government agencies have not wanted to validate or debunk turnout for political events. (Trump’s first press secretary made the ridiculously false claim that Trump’s 2017 inauguration drew the biggest inauguration crowd ever.) So, recent estimates, if they are made at all, tend to come from media outlets, sometimes with the assistance of experts using aerial photography and mathematical formulas.
King’s speech drew 200,000 to 250,000 people
The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a planned, peaceful display of unity among several organizations and grassroots activists that had been fighting for civil rights through boycotts and marches. The event included many celebrities and musicians and multiple speeches in addition to King’s speech.
The crowd stretched from the Lincoln Memorial, past the Reflecting Pool and toward the Washington Monument.
Here is an image of the crowd during King’s speech:
A crowd near the Reflecting Pool listens to Martin Luther King Jr. and other speakers during the March on Washington in 1963. (U.S. Information Agency, Press and Publications Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
The National Archives says 250,000 people attended the March on Washington during King’s speech.
The U.S. Census Bureau uses a somewhat smaller number of “more than 200,000.”
The NAACP said that the rally drew over “260,000” people from across the country.
The Ellipse crowd on Jan. 6 was smaller
Trump had repeatedly encouraged his supporters the month before his speech at the Ellipse around noon on Jan. 6 to come for a “big protest” in Washington.
By the time Trump finished his speech, crowds had started to gather outside the Capitol.
Estimates are fairly loose, but none exceed King’s turnout.
The New York Times reported that “tens of thousands” of Trump supporters gathered for the rally. The Washington Post said “thousands” had assembled at the Ellipse for the speech.
The House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack put the crowd number at 53,000, or at most a quarter of the generally accepted size of the crowd during King’s speech.
“From a tent backstage at the Ellipse, President Trump looked out at the crowd of approximately 53,000 supporters and became enraged,” the House committee found. “Just under half of those gathered — a sizeable stretch of about 25,000 people — refused to walk through the magnetometers and be screened for weapons, leaving the venue looking half-empty to the television audience at home.”
The day after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told The Associated Press that law enforcement’s estimates of the overall crowd size in the protests “were all over the board” from as low as “2,000 to as many as 80,000.”
We found several photos from that day, including one Reuters wide-shot image that features the Washington Monument in the background.
With the Washington Monument in the background, people attend a rally in support of former President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. (AP)
The question that triggered Trump’s crowd-size answer was about Jan. 6, and Trump called it “the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to.” But some of the things he said — such as “the exact same picture” and “from Lincoln to Washington” — correlate with features of a different Trump speech on July 4, 2019.
The 2019 “Salute to America” event, which draws hundreds of thousands of people each year, honored the military’s branches and featured a military flyover and fireworks. On the Capitol side, many came to hear singer Carole King and Trump was the first president in nearly 70 years to add a speech onto the event.
A crowd at the Reflecting Pool listens to a July 4 celebration hosted by then-President Donald Trump in 2019. (Credit: The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Steve Doig, a professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication who has studied crowd size estimates, told PolitiFact that, the photos show the crowd stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the end of the Reflecting Pool, but give no hint of how far the crowd extends beyond the trees that line the pool.
We were not able to find crowd estimates from the 2019 event.
Our ruling
Describing his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump said he spoke to the “same number of people, if not, we had more” than King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.
The crowd-size comparison is wrong. Credible estimates say many more people attended the 1963 March on Washington during King’s speech than attended Trump’s Ellipse speech.
We rate the comparison False.
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PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
