Fake news: Trump's crowd size and the Associated Press

It is very rare to have an opportunity to capture a lie spreading around the world at warp speed and track it. The feat is not so different than NASA seeking to land and hitch a ride on an asteroid.

The Associated Press story of Trump’s crowd size at yesterday’s rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, and the estimations of it being repeated mindlessly around the world flow directly from the lips of a county official in Cape May, to the notepad of a national political reporter assigned to cover the Trump campaign.

Who is that reporter?

Steve Peoples is the quintessential access journalist, who seeks favor by serving power. His concept of truth is ‘give a little to get a little.’ More than most of his peers, even the very worst and most malfeasant, he models the contemptible qualities of America’s political media so deeply disdained by the American people.

I do not say this lightly, but rather directly and unequivocally, from the miseries of personal experience. He is smug, dishonest, arrogant, incompetent and lazy. I have written about him before — this is The Warning after all:

The Lincoln Project #MediaFail - Chapter 1

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The Lincoln Project #MediaFail - Chapter 2

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President Biden must set the tone

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This Trump crowd size story is a lie based on the laziness, shadiness and carelessness of Steve Peoples’ reporting about the Trump rally, which claims that 80,000 - 100,000 people were in attendance. The AP must retract this baseless number that is a lie passed on by a county official of one of the most MAGA-friendly counties in America, without vetting, measurement or credible secondary sourcing — let alone common sense.

The story is a gift to the Trump campaign, and a peerless propaganda victory in an environment in which momentum and intensity are critical factors. The fantastical number is now “real.” Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted about it too (as an aside, big numbers are a challenge for Johnson, who believes Earth is 6,000 years old and people and dinosaurs lived happily together). It has the double effect of intimidating Biden supporters, and simultaneously disaffecting them. How could it not? Immense rallies — even imagined ones — can have a profound psychological effect.

Here is the Trump crowd:

Photo of Trump Wildwood rally posted by Speaker Mike Johnson on X

Here is what 80,000 people looks like:

AT&T Stadium has a capacity of 80,000

A John Kerry/Bruce Springsteen campaign stop in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 2004, drew more than 80,000 people

This story, and worse, the tale of how it came to be, published in the first place should be frozen in amber as a testament to the rottenness and brokenness of so much of the American media in the Trump era.

Perhaps it will be the case some day that people will ask how it came to be that fascists took control of what Churchill called the “Great Republic.”

Propaganda will be the answer.

The AP should be ashamed. Julie Pace, executive editor, should be fired, and so should Steve Peoples. It is what would happen at a credible news organization, but of course a credible news organization wouldn’t have published such schlock to begin with.

It is a grotesquerie.

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