Crowd Size and Trumpian Epistemology

      Donald Trump, as we have well learned by now, is a champion of a somewhat arcane epistemological theory. This theory holds that what is valid—what, as a logician might phrase it, is the case— is what the beholder would like to be the case.

      Then-President Trump wanted it to be true, for example, that he had triumphed in the 2020 presidential election, ergo he did win. And the fact that all the various officials and courts that examined the evidence involved did not see it that way meant the election was stolen from him.

      Recently the former president has been focused on crowd sizes. He wants, understandably, to have drawn the largest crowds. Indeed, that is a particular point of pride for him. Therefore, he has.

      And candidate Trump certainly does not want his crowd sizes to be diminishing due to the length, lack of focus and tediousness of his recent speeches. So, they aren’t. Nor does he want his current opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to be drawing large, even larger, crowds. So, she isn’t.

      But Donald Trump, being of a competitive bent and occasionally concerned with his place in history, has lately wanted to have drawn larger crowds than anybody. “Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” he proclaimed at a recent news conference (demonstrating, too, a unique take on grammar).

      And one orator who failed to draw crowds larger than those drawn by Donald Trump has now been revealed, by Trump, to have been the respected civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

      This means, Trump has explained, that the crowd gathered in Washington, DC, on Jan. 6, 2021 to “Stop the Steal” of the 2020 election was the largest crowd ever gathered in that city. In particular, former President Trump has declared that that crowd was larger than the crowd gathered to demand equal treatment for people then called Negroes in 1963—the audience for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

       Here’s a photograph of Martin Luther King’s crowd on Aug. 28, 1963:

      No one, of course, could have counted—one by one— how many people were in that crowd in 1963. My father, Bernard Stephens, who was involved in organizing that “March On Washington,” was on the crowded podium that day and, was asked by a reporter how many people were gathered between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

       My father had a different take on epistemology than Donald Trump, whom he would have known only as a publicity-seeking real-estate developer. My father looked out over the crowd—which was indeed gigantic—and surmised that it included about a quarter of a million people—a large, but not unreasonable estimate: about five-baseball-parks-worth of people.

       And the number 250,000 stuck. Or perhaps someone else came up with that same reasonable estimate and that stuck.

       Here is the crowd at Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally, shortly before many of its members marched on the Capitol:

It was indeed a very large crowd, though its unprecedented vastness (to be distinguished from its unprecedented seditiousness) was not readily apparent to the police at the time, who estimated that the crowd included 53,000 people:

      When comparing the crowd gathered to support his attempt to toss out a democratic election in 2021 to the crowd gathered to expand democracy in 1963, Trump, naturally, deployed his own alternate epistemology.

      And, graciously, Mr. Trump favored us, in that news conference, with an account of the reasoning he had employed in concluding he had outdrawn Dr. King: “When you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd ... we actually had more people," he said.

       So, by his logic, he did.