Trump Says Jan 6 Crowd Was Bigger Than MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

“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,” Trump said. “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 to… from Lincoln to Washington. And you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd, my friend, we actually had more people.”

King’s speech drew an estimated 250,000 people. It remains unclear how large the “Stop the Steal” crowd was, though the Associated Press has reported that it reached 10,000 by the afternoon when the riot began.

This isn’t the first time Trump’s compared his crowd sizes to MLK Jr’s, or suggested the crowd he drew on January 6 exceeded that of the civil rights icon.

In June 2022, he told an audience in Tennessee that he drew a bigger crowd for his Fourth of July speech in 2020 than King did. He went on to say that the crowd he addressed on January 6 was the “largest number of people I’ve ever spoken to.”

And crowd size has long been a fixation of Trump’s.

The week he was inaugurated in 2017, he infamously claimed to have drawn a larger crowd size than President Barack Obama in 2008, leading then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to berate reporters at his first official press briefing for not reporting that as fact.