Trump makes bizarre comparison saying he pulled bigger crowd than MLK Jr's 'I Have A Dream' speech
Topics: Donald Trump, History, Politics
Thomas Bamford
Featured Image Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Topics: Donald Trump, History, Politics
Donald Trump has claimed that a speech he gave near the Lincoln Memorial drew a larger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr.'s legendary 'I Have a Dream' address, one of the most attended moments in American civil rights history.
The president made the eyebrow-raising comparison on Wednesday, June 10, during an Oval Office ceremony nominally focused on the signing of the Secure America Act, a piece of legislation allocating $70 billion in taxpayer funds to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and other elements of his mass deportation agenda.
But Trump's remarks quickly went off-script, drifting, as they frequently have in recent weeks, toward the ongoing renovations of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
"That's where Martin Luther King made his great speech and they say he had a million people," Trump, 79, said from the Resolute Desk, surrounded by congressional leaders including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso.
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"I made a speech there for July 4th a few years ago, and [it] was packed. They said I had 25,000 people, they said he had a million people."
He then suggested that photographic evidence backed him up, sort of.
"But when you look at the picture, I said 'well, wait, the people are even tighter at mine. I had more people than him,'" Trump continued. "
But they said I had 25,000 and he had a million. But I'm not going to argue with Martin Luther King."
According to the Smithsonian Institution, more than 250,000 people gathered on the National Mall on August 28, 1963, for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the historic demonstration at which King delivered his iconic address.
"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation," King said at the opening of his remarks that day. The speech is widely credited with galvanising public support for desegregation and helping lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Trump's July 4, 2019 address, billed by the then-president as "one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C.", was the first time a sitting US president had spoken on the National Mall on Independence Day since Harry Truman marked the 175th anniversary of the nation back in 1951.
The National Park Service did not release an official crowd estimate at the time.
Trump has nonetheless continued to insist his crowd was larger in the years since, including, reportedly, as recently as April.
Wednesday's ceremony was otherwise dominated by Republican congressional leaders applauding the passage of the Secure America Act, which directs tens of billions in federal funding toward immigration enforcement and detention infrastructure as part of Trump's second-term crackdown on undocumented immigration.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, meanwhile, has become an unlikely recurring subject of Trump's public appearances in recent weeks.
A federal judge is currently weighing up how reversible the president's efforts to repaint the pool blue actually are, amid a lawsuit targeting his broader push to renovate several of Washington's historic landmarks.