Trump isn’t campaigning as hard as he used to

Donald Trump has always been fixated on crowd size, to the point that it’s one of the defining features of his approach to politics.

There’s undoubtedly some psychology that might be unpacked here; his interest in the audience is certainly downstream from his past celebrity and intermingled with his focus on television ratings and opinion polls (when favorable). But it is what it is and, for Trump, it is a metric of incomprehensible importance.

Trump complained about coverage of Harris’s audiences on social media.

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was,” he wrote, “And she pays for her “Crowd.” When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

There is no evidence that Harris pays people to attend her rallies or needs to.

When Trump launched his campaign in 2015, people were paid to attend and to fill out the audience.

But again, Trump is holding far fewer rallies than he did in 2016 and has held far fewer public appearances than he did in 2020, the two previous times he sought the presidency.