Donald Trump fell back on a familiar tactic as he tried to downplay the weekend’s “No Kings” protests: questioning the size of the demonstrations.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, Trump said the protests—which drew a reported seven million people across 2,700 rallies around the country—had been “very small, very ineffective.”
The 79-year-old also described those protesting against his administration as “whacked out” and insisted he is “not a king at all.”
“No Kings” rallies were held across all 50 states on Saturday, with over 100,000 attending one in New York City. Organizers said Saturday’s turnout was two million more than the figure that attended June’s protests, which coincided with Trump’s military birthday parade.
“I think it’s a joke,” Trump said of the rallies. “I looked at the people, they’re not representative of this country.”
Trump also bizarrely claimed that anti-MAGA philanthropist George Soros had paid for placards seen at the rallies. “I looked at all the brand new signs, paid for, I’m guessing it was paid for by Soros and other left-radical lunatics, it looks like it was, we’re checking it out.”
The president then told reporters, “By the way I’m not a king, I’m not a king, I worked my a– off to make my country great, that’s all it is. I’m not a king at all.”
Trump spent the weekend playing golf at his private resort in Florida.
However on Saturday evening, Trump posted to Truth Social a surreal AI video that seemed to reference the rallies. In the clip, he is shown wearing a crown and flying a plane with “KING TRUMP” emblazoned on the side.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
The No Kings Coalition said Saturday’s protests were one of the largest single-day nationwide demonstrations in U.S. history.
“Today, millions of Americans stood together to reject authoritarianism and remind the world that our democracy belongs to the people, not to one man’s ambition,” said Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, the co-founders of Indivisible.
Trump has a well-documented history of being obsessed with the size of crowds.
Former President Barack Obama trolled Trump in June when he pointed out that the size of his first inauguration swamped the turnout for the 79-year-old.
“In 2020, one person won the election, and it wasn’t the guy complaining about it,” Obama said in Connecticut. “And that’s just a fact, just like [the fact that] my inauguration had more people. I say that, by the way, not because—I don’t care—but facts are important.”
The New York Times estimated Trump’s inauguration crowd in 2017 at around 600,000 people—which was around a third of the size of Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. However, Trump has repeatedly claimed his inauguration was the largest ever, with perhaps “a million and a half” people in attendance.
Last year, Trump was fixated on the number of people attending his presidential campaign rallies over that of his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.
“Listen, I had 107,000 people in New Jersey, you didn’t report it,” he complained in August last year. “What did she have yesterday, 2,000 people? If I ever had 2,000 people, you’d say my campaign was finished.”
“I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size, and they never say the crowd is big,” he said. “That’s why I always say, ‘Turn around the cameras.’”
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