Kevin McCarthy says Trump needs to stop questioning Harris’s crowd sizes

Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican speaker of the House, urged Donald Trump on Monday to stop questioning the size of Kamala Harris’s crowds at her campaign rallies, and to instead focus on her policies and record.

“You’ve gotta make this race not about personalities,” McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. “Stop questioning the size of her crowds, and start questioning her position, when it comes to: what did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?”

This comes just one day after the former US president and current Republican presidential nominee falsely accused Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, of using artificial intelligence to create a photograph displaying large crowds of supporters at her rally last week in Detroit, Michigan.

On Sunday, Trump shared a photograph of the large crowd at Harris’s rally to his millions of followers on his Truth Social and claimed that the image of the crowd from Harris’s event was fake.

“Look, we caught her with a fake ‘crowd’. There was nobody there!” Trump wrote.

In another post on Sunday, he called Harris a “CHEATER” and said that “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!”

Many videos and photographs from the event in Detroit last week show a large crowd in attendance, and shortly after Trump accused Harris of fabricating the crowd, her campaign responded to the allegations on X, and denied that the photo was manipulated.

The photograph in question “is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan” the Harris campaign said, adding: “Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week … Low energy?”

David Plouffe, a senior adviser for the Harris campaign, also responded to Trump’s allegations, and said: “These are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet. The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades.”