Atlanta: When former US president Donald Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in Atlanta on Saturday, fog machines shot white plumes of smoke into the air, heralding his arrival. If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapours.
“Crazy Kamala,” he fumed a minute into his speech. “She was here a week ago – lots of empty seats – but the crowd she got was because she had entertainers.” Four days earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had packed about the same number of people (10,000) into the arena, the Georgia State University Convocation Centre.
It was the first major rally of her newborn campaign, and she had two rappers (Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion) on hand to hype up her crowd. Trump, who has been shunned by much of the entertainment industry, spun this as somehow cheating in the all-important competition over crowd size. “I don’t need entertainers,” he said on Saturday.
“I fill the stadium because I’m making America great again.” The numbers game has long been of paramount importance for Trump. As a reality television star, he was obsessed with ratings.
(“What is it about me that gets Larry King his highest ratings?” he wrote in one of his books.) This only intensified once he entered politics. He spent his first full day in office as president trying to convince the news media that his inauguration crowd was larger than the Women’s March the day .