Kellyanne Conway, a former aide to Donald Trump, claimed on Sunday that the former president had an 8,000 person crowd while speaking at a Detroit church over the weekend, sparking jokes and pushback from social media users.
On Saturday, Trump hosted a roundtable discussion at the 180 Church, a Black church on the outskirts of downtown Detroit as he seeks to win over Black voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Polls have so far shown that the results will be tight as Trump and President Joe Biden are statistically tied in most surveys or having only marginal leads.
During a Sunday appearance on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo, Conway discussed Trump’s campaign efforts as she compared them to Biden’s.
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“Biden’s not doing anything like that, look at the contrast of just this weekend. You’ve got Donald Trump in Detroit talking to 8,000 people at a Black church,” she said to Bartiromo.
However, it’s not clear how many were in attendance at the church on Saturday and the Trump campaign has not yet released a statement about the crowd size.
Newsweek has reached out to 180 Church and Trump’s campaign via email for comment.
Since Conway’s comments, some have taken to X, formerly Twitter, to joke and pushback against her claims.
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S.V. Dáte, White House correspondent for HuffPost, joked that the crowd size was larger and wrote on X: “Ridiculous. It was at least 8 million.”
Activist Jules Morgan noted Conway’s previous phrase “alternative facts,” which she used in 2017 during a Meet the Press interview when she defended then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer inaccurately describing Trump’s inauguration crowd as “the largest ever.”
“Ms Alternative Facts strikes again. There’s no way there were 8K people in that church,” Morgan wrote.
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X user Eric Kleefeld posted, “And a handful of them were even Black!”
Some critics have accused Trump of filling the historically Black church with white supporters and even “staging” the event to show a robust crowd.
X user and lifelong Democrat Christopher Webb posted a reaction to X on Saturday and wrote, “Trump is definitely going to win the Black vote…by filling a Black church with white folks for his rally.”‘
In addition, the Biden-Harris campaign took to X to react to the visit and wrote: “Trump’s desperate attempt at Black voter ‘outreach’ in front of a noticeably empty and white audience.”
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However, supporters also praised the former president for reaching out to the Black community as one participant noted during the roundtable discussion, “President Trump, I’m so humbled that you would be here. President Obama never came to the hood. President Biden went to the big NAACP dinner but he never came to the hood — so Thank you!”
Michigan is a crucial battleground state in the 2024 election, with Biden winning the state by 2.8 percent in 2020 against Trump. As Detroit has one of the highest proportions of Black residents in the United States, it’s poised to play a crucial role in determining the winner of Michigan’s electoral votes.
Trump received less than 10 percent of Black voter support in Michigan in 2020, but according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll that was published Sunday, about 15 percent of Black voters in Michigan have pledged their support for him.
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The poll surveyed 500 registered Black voters in Michigan, was conducted between June 9 and 13 and has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
