Trump compares Jan. 6 crowd size to MLK march

Former President Donald Trump has social media comparing photos and looking in history books after he claimed the crowd during his Jan. 6, 2021, "Stop the Steal" Rally was bigger than the estimated crowd of 250,000 who attended Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington.

Trump made the comparison on Thursday during a news conference at his Mar-A-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

"I'll tell you, it's very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture— a small number of people, relatively, going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd," the Republican presidential nominee said of the 2021 crowd, some of whom preceded the storm on the U.S. Capitol. "The biggest crowd I've ever spoken to — I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me."

Trump then compared the crowd at his rally to the number of people in attendance for the revolutionary civil rights leader's famous "I Have a Dream" speech on Aug. 28, 1963.

"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, the same number of people, if not, we had more," 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 (and) 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 liked Dr. Martin Luther King."

How many people attended the "Stop the Steal" Rally?

The House Select Committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6 estimated that Trump's speech drew 53,000 supporters.

"From a tent backstage at the Ellipse, President Trump looked out at the crowd of approximately 53,000 supporters and became enraged," according to the "187 minutes of dereliction" report. "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."

'More Trump in front of a mic please'

Multiple X users, including Andrew Wortman, shared posts comparing side-by-side aerial shots of the two crowds.

Others, including former CNN host Don Lemon, responded to Trump's claims on X with skepticism.

"He is on television comparing his crowd sizes to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.," Lemon said in a video he posted on X. "He really does have a dream, a fever dream."

Jim Messina, a political adviser who was the White House deputy chief of staff for operations under former president Barack Obama, shared an X post saying, "More Trump in front of a mic please."

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) responded to Trump's claims on X, saying, "Donald Trump just said that he had a bigger crowd on January 6 than Dr. Martin Luther King did when he delivered 'I Have A Dream.' ...Not only is that completely false, but here’s what is more important: MLK’s speech was about democracy. Trump’s was about tearing it down."

Tabie Germain, another X user, posted about Trump's possible confusion between the Million Man March on Oct. 16, 1995, and the March on Washington.

"Trump is comparing himself to MLK... Then confused the Million Man March for the March on Washington," Germain said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump compares Jan. 6 rally crowd size to MLK march on Washington