Former President Donald Trump launched a fierce critique of Vice President Kamala Harris during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, questioning the media’s depiction of her campaign’s popularity shortly after she was declared the Democratic nominee earlier this week. Trump, who has frequently criticized media coverage of his own events versus those of his rivals, did not shy away when a reporter inquired about the size of the crowds at Harris’s recent rallies.
“Are you worried at all about the size of Harris’s crowd?” one reporter asked. “Oh, give me a break,” Trump responded sharply. “Listen, I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn’t report it. I’m so glad you asked. What did she have yesterday? 2,000 people? If I ever had 2,000 people, you’d say my campaign is finished. It’s so dishonest, the press. And here’s a great example. I had in Michigan recently 25,000 people and 25,000 people were just we just couldn’t get them in. We had in Harrisburg 20, 25,000 people and 20,000 people couldn’t get in. We had so many, nobody ever mentions that.”
He continued: “When she gets 1,500 people, and I saw it yesterday on ABC, which they said the crowd was so big. That’s why I’m always saying ‘turn around the cameras.’ I’m so glad you asked that. I think it’s so terrible when you say, ‘well she has 1,500 people, 1,000 people’ and they talk about, ‘oh, the enthusiasm.’ Let me tell you, we have the enthusiasm.”
Trump also announced that his campaign has agreed to a trio of debates against Harris. “I think it’s very important to have debates. And we’ve agreed with Fox on a date of September 4th. We’ve agreed with NBC, fairly full agreement subject to them, on September 10th. And we’ve agreed with ABC on September 25th. So we have those three dates. So we have September 4th, September 10th, and September 25th,” he said.
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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was picked by Harris on Monday to be her running mate, has already drawn a heap of criticism for several false claims he has made, including one regarding an argument for banning so-called “assault weapons.” Walz claimed to have carried such weapons “in war” during his tenure in the Army National Guard, as shown in a video released by the Kamala Harris campaign on Tuesday. However, there’s a glaring issue with his statement.
Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard but did not see combat, according to his résumé. He primarily responded to natural disasters in Minnesota and Nebraska, as he mentioned in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio. Although Walz had some overseas assignments, such as supporting the European security force in Italy during the war in Afghanistan and participating in joint training exercises with NATO forces in Norway, he was stationed away from active conflict zones.
According to MPR, Walz affirmed that he reenlisted in the National Guard in response to the 9/11 attacks, but he did not engage in combat before retiring in 2005. “I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did. I know that,” Walz told the outlet in 2018. But Walz gave a much different impression of his military service at a town hall event, which the Harris campaign highlighted shortly after his selection as VP.
“I spent 25 years in the Army, and I hunt,” Walz says at the beginning of the clip. He said he supports “common sense legislation” that “protects the Second Amendment,” but said he favors extensive background checks. “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is [sic] the only place that those weapons are at,” he said.
