President Donald Trump posted on social media on Thursday about the speech he gave the day prior to kick off the Great American State Fair in Washington, DC: “Everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech because they loved hearing about a truly successful America.”
False. Trump’s previous categorical declarations that “nobody leaves” his events until he is finished talking weren’t true, and his specific claim that nobody left this particular event until he had wrapped up was demonstrably incorrect as well.
A video posted by The Bulwark, a media outlet critical of Trump, showed dozens of people streaming out of the event about 17 minutes into the president’s 28-minute address. CNN senior correspondent Donie O’Sullivan, who was there interviewing attendees, says he observed hundreds of people heading to the exits as Trump’s speech was ongoing.
There are lots of unremarkable reasons for such departures. O’Sullivan says some people told him they had come to see the pre-speech flyovers by military jets. The crowd for an officially nonpartisan event commemorating the country’s 250th anniversary, held on the pedestrian-friendly National Mall in the Democratic-dominated capital, likely included a higher proportion of casual onlookers than a typical Trump rally in one of his rural strongholds. People have jobs, families and obligations. And it’s certainly true that most of the crowd stayed until Trump concluded.
But Trump is the one who asserted “everybody” stayed until he was done. That didn’t happen.
So why did the president say it? In fairness, it’s not clear if he noticed the people leaving or if he saw the Bulwark video. But he has long been a serial liar about trivial matters and a serial exaggerator of both the crowds he attracts and his general popularity. For years, as he has worked to cultivate an image of matchless magnetism, he has proven highly sensitive to facts that puncture it – like accurate observations that some people are willing to turn their backs on some of his words.
A long history of false claims that nobody leaves early
Trump’s Thursday post revived a declaration he made repeatedly during his 2024 presidential campaign.
After his 2024 opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, said in their televised debate that “people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Trump said, “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” He then returned to the point unprompted at his own 2024 campaign events, saying in Arizona and North Carolina that “nobody leaves early” and in Michigan that “honestly, nobody does.”
He wasn’t correct then, either.
The Detroit Free Press noted that at one fall 2024 event in Michigan, “the crowd grew noticeably thinner as the 85-minute speech went on.” The New York Times noted that, at an event in North Carolina days before Election Day 2024, “Within five minutes of the start of his speech, a stream of audience members began heading for the exit, a steady exodus that never quite abated.” The Washington Post wrote a story about the fact that “scores of people” had left early from many Trump events in 2024, pointing out, for example, that “hundreds if not thousands” left one in Atlanta. (The Post interviewed various early-leavers around the country; they cited everything from a desire to beat traffic to a dog waiting at home to work the next morning to poor sound quality to, sometimes, dissatisfaction with the speeches.) The Guardian reported that “about three out of 10 people” at a fall 2024 Trump event in Georgia left before the end of that speech, to which he had arrived late.
Of course, none of these early departures prevented him from winning the election.
Trump, usually adept at reciting his false claims even after they have been debunked, struggled at least once to deliver this one. At a September 2024 rally in Michigan, he said, “The people that you see leaving”…then caught himself and said, “Because nobody ever leaves”…but then added, “And when they do, I finish up quick, believe me”…but then suggested that all the people who get up from their seats are merely going to line up to take post-speech backstage pictures with him.
Which is, as that very Trump monologue made quite clear, not true.
