It’s hard to remember crowd sizes being a mainstay of political discourse before President Donald Trump entered the political scene. In his latest Truth Social meltdown, Trump echoed the conspiracy floating around social media concerning planes, reflections, and Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a long Truth Social post late Sunday, Trump laid out his latest attack on his Democratic opponent. He shows off two different pictures of Harris’ landing at a Detroit hangar, claiming that the campaign faked the massive crowd waiting for her with AI.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump’s post said. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST.”
Trump later claims that a second picture shows the real truth, because the massive crowds weren’t captured in the airplane’s reflection. Like many hair-brained theories, this “Airplane Reflection” conspiracy first spread fire on TikTok.
The first piece of evidence debunking this theory was that there are actually multiple accounts of the event, including some made by official news sources like Detroit’s ABC affiliate WXYZ.
You don’t have to be an Airplane Reflection Expert to know that the theory doesn’t hold water. The Daily Beast spoke with Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnik, who claimed that the reason that the plane doesn’t show reflections of the crowd, is because it’s actually quite far away. The photo was captured with a high-end zoom lens, which sometimes gives photos a “flat” look, making subjects appear closer than usual.
In response to this easily debunked conspiracy theory, the Harris campaign has opened a Truth Social account, where it posts Harris’ rally sizes side by side to Trump’s. This more caddy approach to the classic “when they go low, we go high” routine seems to ring a little more effective, at least in the social media sphere.