Donald Trump has falsely accused Kamala Harris of faking crowds at her rallies, as the vice president’s 2024 US election campaign swells in support at events and in the polls.

Trump, in response to a well-attended event in New Jersey, accused Harris and her campaign of using generative AI to give the appearance of support, despite videos and reporters confirming the photo and crowd were real.

“This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING – And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box,” Trump said on Truth Social.

“She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”

People who were at the event quickly posted videos from around and outside the crowd to prove that it was real and the photo was not AI-generated.

Flailing

The Harris campaign responded by labelling Trump’s claims “conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet”.

Harris has held a series of campaign events in key states of Georgia and Nevada in recent days, drawing strong crowds of energised Democratic supporters, at the same time as polls in key states show her opening a lead on the Republican nominee.

A New York Times/Siena poll of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showed that Harris was leading Trump by 4 per cent in each state.

Trump and his campaign have continually railed against polls showing the Vice President in the lead, accusing pollsters without evidence of overstating and inflating her support.

Paul Gigot, a conservative commentator, said Republicans fear that Trump’s presidential campaign is in trouble.

“It’s not just the enthusiasm for Democrats who have united, it’s that that fact, the switchover, seems to have caught Trump by surprise,” he said on the Potomac Watch podcast.

“The Cook Report, which rates elections, has moved Arizona, Georgia and Nevada states to toss up from what had been leaning Donald Trump, and this is before the Democratic Convention in Chicago in two weeks, which will give Harris and Walz presumably another boost.”

The Harris campaign has also taken to Truth Social, Trump’s struggling social media platform, to post comparison photos of recent events in the same cities, showing energised and large crowds compared to Trump’s.

Messaging

Like Trump’s questioning of Kamala Harris’s racial identity, his claims about her faking crowds have been met with scorn from commentators.

Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican Speaker of the House, begged Trump to stop questioning the sizes and legitimacy of the Harris campaign’s events.

“Stop questioning the size of her crowds, and start questioning her position,” he said on Fox News.

“What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a tsar?”

The Democrats have successfully put Trump and Republicans on the defensive with their messaging, and Trump’s VP pick JD Vance is failing to cut through with his own.

Trump has hosted few events – his strongest medium during the 2016 and 2020 elections – and has pushed back at journalists who question why he wasn’t out on the campaign trail and the size of his crowds.

“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 during a press conference.

“If not, we had more.”

He has instead stuck to news conferences, recorded interviews with friendly media, and now has a live interview with Elon Musk on X.