We all know that Donald Trump is obsessed with crowd size. But it seems like nobody’s told him how to make his lies a little bit more believable.

After the whopper of a fairytale about his inauguration crowd way back in 2017, America was treated to a cavalcade of new, Orwellian phrases. “Alternative facts.” “Fake News.”

And he’s doubled down every time he’s been called out, even if there’s photographic evidence (there’s always photo evidence). He claimed a recent speech drew a larger crowd than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I have a dream” speech.

But his claim about the audience for last night’s livestream interview with Elon Musk has to be the biggest, most hilarious lie of all. His own claim — that 60 million people were tuning in — already had to be corrected mid-broadcast by Musk. Elon explained that, although his own data tracker only showed about a million people watching, nearly a hundred million would see it “in the next few days and weeks.”

But Trump’s political cohorts? They had no such limits, and no such clarifications. Roger Stone was free to sound as loony as he always does, and he did.

Over on Newsmax, Stone — the impeccably dressed con man who’s been sucking up to Trump for years — made a claim that was more than a little improbable:

“The president going on X with Elon Musk last night—which got almost, I think, 1 billion views now, is a perfect example of how you combat the disinformation being pumped out by the Democrat media cabal and the Kamala Harris campaign.”

A BILLION, Roger? Three times the number of every man, woman, and child in America? That would be a feat indeed.

Now, it may be that Stone was referring to something else Musk said about the livestream. Musk said that it had “reached” a billion people, if you include the total views of every tweet and every comment that even discussed it in passing, positive or negative. Even tweets that said “I’d never watch that interview” counted in Musk’s total.

They’d have to — the site only has about 500 million active monthly users.

The fact is, however, that not only do we see Trump still employing unbelievable nonsense to boost his apparent popularity, but we see him lying about Kamala’s crowd sizes. He tried to claim that a photo of the crowd that greeted her at her airplane was nonexistent, an image entirely generated by AI.

He might as well claim she’s not a real person.

He HAS to pretend he’s more popular than her, or he will go insane.

they're a couple hours away from claiming 10 billion people listened to Elon Musk fluff Donald Trump last night pic.twitter.com/blFJQTkehd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2024