Megyn Kelly has slammed Donald Trump for obsessing over the crowd size at Kamala Harris’ airport rally, labeling his claims that it was faked ‘so stupid’.
The conservative commentator called out the former president for peddling a conspiracy theory after he claimed a picture of supporters outside Air Force Two, the vice president’s official plane, was AI generated.
This was later debunked by the photographer behind the picture and experts, as well as by video footage of the event which clearly shows thousands of people filling the Detroit Metro Airport hangar.
Speaking on her radio show, Kelly said of the Republican nominee’s attacks on his Democrat rival: ‘So unsmart. So dumb… He’s claiming that the crowds, the big crowds outside of [Harris’] airplane and elsewhere are AI-generated, and it’s just, there’s just no proof of that.’
‘It was a conspiracy theory somebody started,’ she went on, adding that Trump should pay more attention to his campaign and policies, exclaiming: ‘Just focus on the damn border!’
Megyn Kelly has slammed Donald Trump for obsessing over the crowd size at Kamala Harris ‘ airport rally
Thousands of Kamala Harris supporters turned up to a rally in Detroit last Wednesday
One of Kelly’s guests, editor of the libertarian Reason Magazine Matt Welch, suggested that Trump will fail to win over voters if he fails to focus on the issues which matter.
‘If Trump spends more time complaining about depictions of the crowd size at Kamala Harris rallies, that’s gonna really seal the deal for him,’ he said sarcastically. ‘That’s gonna get the swing state voters!’
Former Fox News presenter Kelly also questioned how the footage could have possibly been faked when so much footage was coming out of the event.
‘There were all these other pictures from people who were actually there showed the huge… like are they all in on it?’ she said. ‘Like, everyone who showed up got an AI filter that they put on? So stupid.’
Her comments came after she started her politics panel show by reading off recent polls, saying they showed that things ‘are not going in the right direction for Team Trump’.
She dismissed claims that it was just down to the polls’ oversampling of Democrats, arguing that it’s ‘across the board.’
Supporters gathered on the tarmac outside of the hangar the Air Force Two in the background attend a campaign rally with US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris
‘He’s fallen in left-leaning polls, he’s fallen in right-leaning polls,’ she said. ‘This is reality, and the Trump team needs to deal with reality if it wants to win.’
It comes as one of the latest polls has put Harris as the current frontrunner in the tight race for the White House.
The prediction comes from the Washington Post’s polling average, which suggests that the race has effectively reversed itself since Joe Biden was replaced by his Vice President on the Democrat ticket.
Read More
Harris opens up second path to victory by securing either Rust Belt OR Sun Belt, new polling shows
Compared to July 21 – the day President Biden dropped out of the race – Harris has gained two percentage points nationally, meaning she leads on her Republican rival as it stands.
The Harris campaign jumped on Trump’s false allegations, claiming it is a sign of the former president’s growing desperation as he sees them getting ahead in the polls.
Trump reshared a picture of the scene on Sunday, claiming on his Truth Social platform that the high definition image proved Harris ‘AI’d it.’
‘Look, we caught her with a fake “crowd”,’ he posted without any evidence. ‘There was nobody there!’
Harris HQ shared the post on X with the caption ‘This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan.’
It made a further swipe by adding: ‘Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week… Low energy?’
Fact check website Snopes said that the Winston AI Detector determined the image was ’96 percent human’ – meaning that it was ‘likely photographed by someone and not created using an AI-generation tool.’
If anything, Snopes’ findings indicate that ‘it’s possible that [the photograph’s] lighting, shadows or filtering was digitally manipulated’ but not the photo as a whole.
Spectrum News has also determined ‘the crowd did in fact exist, and the rally was attended by thousands of people, many of whom posted their own pictures and videos of the event, which was also livestreamed by dozens of news channels and attended by a slew of prominent politicians.’
It went on to quote Michigan outlet MLive, which said ‘About 15,000 people filled the hangar, the crowd spilling out onto the tarmac.’
Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnick defended his photograph, telling The Daily Beast: ‘It was a large crowd, and the pictures that I took that are on the Getty website speak to that.’