Remember when Barack Obama described Donald Trump as a “billionaire who has not stopped whining?”. Well, the former president is at it again, much to everyone’s dismay.
This time, the subject of Trump’s complaining is unsurprisingly his presidential opponent, Kamala Harris, who he claimed in a recent post on Truth Social (where else?) had “faked” her social media engagement numbers.
You need only look to coconut trees and brat memes to understand how the Harris campaign has been dominating social media ever since her entry into the presidential race, but the new figures that Trump is responding to outline her online omnipresence in black and white (but not orange, as Trump might’ve preferred).
According to a recent analysis by Axos, Harris’ TikTok page gained 2 million followers in the first 24 hours after she became the presidential nominee (it now has nearly 5 million), with her first six videos on the platform garnering more than 113 million views combined. The same Axos article commended Harris’ social media use for its humor, adoption of trends, and its pivot to a “saucier, more ruthless campaign.”
Naturally, this simply wouldn’t do for Trump, whose perpetually-pressed caps lock button got a workout when he responded to the statistics on social media. “IT’S ALWAYS FAKE WITH KAMALA,” he wrote, surprisingly spelling her name correctly. “KAMALA HAS TO PAY FOR HER FAKE ENGAGEMENT.” Then, the guy who inflated his crowd sizes to the point of falsely claiming they were bigger than MLK’s, went on to allege that Harris’ statistics were “MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION.”
Of course, it’s not the first time Trump has projected the very crowd-inflating behaviors he’s known for onto his opponent, having claimed earlier this month that Harris’ rally crowd sizes were AI-generated. I know it goes without saying, since Trump claimed it, but they weren’t. It’s the same obsession with his follower count that Obama referenced with a cheeky hand gesture during his DNC speech, and Trump’s hypocrisy is rightfully being called out on social media.
“Says the guy with a fake tan, fake hair [and] fake real estate values,” one user wrote on X, with another adding that the former president is the “king of projection.” Elsewhere, people sorted through the laundry list of Trump’s other fake attributes, from his “Christian values” to his “teeth” and even his “fake presidency.”
I guess from now on, whenever he attempts to debunk the size of Harris’ following, we can refer to Trump as the orange boy who cried “FAKE!”.