Trump brags about drawing a larger crowd than MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech
TheGrio...
“I actually had more people, but that’s okay,” said President Donald Trump, while sharing renovations he is making to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
President Donald Trump is yet again comparing his crowd sizes to a prominent Black figure, but this time, civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump, who infamously claimed to have brought out a larger inauguration crowd than former President Barack Obama, said on Thursday that he’s also drawn more people to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall than Dr. King did at the 1963 March on Washington.
During a press conference in the Oval Office, President Trump shared updates on construction projects his administration is undertaking to beautify the White House and Washington, D.C., including replacing the surface stone of the historic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.
“That’s where Martin Luther King gave his great speech,” said Trump, referring to MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech more than 60 years ago.
The president continued, “[Dr. King] had a million people, and I had the same exact crowd. Maybe a little bit more.”
According to estimates from the National Park Service, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew about 260,000 people. Organized by civil rights and queer activist Bayard Rustin and labor unionist and activist A. Philip Randolph, the March on Washington drew a mostly Black, but diverse crowd of Americans advocating for the end of racism and equal rights for millions of disenfranchised Black Americans. The historical event is credited with helping push President John F. Kennedy Jr. to the Civil Rights Act, which was passed in 1964 after Kennedy’s assassination.
While discussing the historical site, President Trump shared that “pictures of Martin Luther King’s crowd,” telling reporters, “My crowd, the exact same, everything, but it was 70 years difference.” Moments later, he added, “I actually had more people, but that’s okay.”
It is unclear whether the president was referring to his 2017 outdoor inauguration or to participants in his 2025 inauguration, which drew crowds despite being held indoors. There is no official crowd count of Trump’s inauguration, as the Park Service stopped tallying estimates in 1997.
By comparison, Obama, America’s first Black president, drew an estimated crowd of 1.8 million. That figure became a fixation for Trump, who infamously and falsely claimed to have drawn a larger crowd. A 2017 analysis by the Associated Press noted significant declines in Metro trips and hotel occupancy, suggesting far fewer attendees for Trump’s first inauguration. One expert estimates that Trump’s first inauguration drew about a third of the audience Obama’s did.
“While he’s busy measuring crowd sizes against the March on Washington and invoking Martin Luther King Jr., most Americans are measuring how they’ll pay for rent, groceries, and gas,” said Brandon Weathersby, a spokesperson for American Bridge 21st Century, a political research firm. Weathersby tells theGrio, “The obsession with his optics and political rivals says a lot, because if lowering the cost of living were the priority, that’s what he’d be talking about instead.”
Dr. Marcus Board, Jr., an associate professor of political science studies at Howard University, described President Trump as a “rage baiter,” telling theGrio that his recent remarks about his crowd size compared to that of Dr. King are for “the purpose of getting a reactionary response” from the public and making them “incensed.”
“I think he is, in many ways, trying to distract folks from the midterm elections, for which the Republican Party looks like they will take some significant losses,” says Board.
As it relates to evoking the name of MLK, the political science professor said, “[Trump] has a level of what we would see often as disrespect for a figure as revered as Dr. King, whether in being dismissive or misrepresentative or generally ignorant to the value that a figure like Dr. King brings to so many people’s lives.”
He added, “It’s very important to be conscious of the ways in which a person who is in the highest political office tells you what they value and what they do not.”
Watch Trump’s remarks about MLK and crowd sizes below: