Donald Trump boasts about South Carolina rally size in Mar-a-Lago press conference. It wasn't true. (2024)

What started as a press conference on future presidential debates quickly spiraled into Donald Trump venting about media coverage of his rival and insisting that his rally crowds — especially in South Carolina — are bigger.

“I have hundreds of thousands of people,” Trump declared at his lectern Aug. 8. “In South Carolina, I had 88,000 people. In Alabama, I had 68,000. Nobody says that.”

Trump’s comments about his crowd sizes came in the first 20 minutes of a freewheeling question-and-answer session at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 8, and after days of positive media coverage about the huge crowds rallying behind Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as they began their battleground states tour.

But as the former president stood before reporters, he fumed.

“Nobody’s had crowds like I have, and you know that. And when she gets 1,000 people and everybody starts jumping. You know that if I had 1,000 people (you) would say, people would say, ‘That’s the end of his campaign,’ “ he said.

That’s when he claimed he draws hundreds of thousands of people, including an 88,000-person rally in South Carolina.

But the rally Trump appeared to be referencing wasn’t a rally at all. It was a football game.

The former president seemed to be mentioning his Nov. 25 appearance at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia for the state’s biggest college football spectacle of the year: the Clemson-South Carolina football matchup.

The game was not a Trump campaign rally. It’s a college duel that takes place every year.

His appearance was brief.

Trump walked onto the field, standing at the 25-yard-line with Gov. Henry McMaster. Loud cheers greeted him along with scattered boos. Trump waved to fans and the student section.

He made no remarks. He just smiled and waved.

The matchup, known to many as The Palmetto Bowl, is the state’s marquee annual sporting event focused on the enduring rivalry between the Clemson University Tigers and the University of South Carolina Gameco*cks.

Capacity at Williams-Brice Stadium is above 77,500.

If the Palmetto Bowl sells out, it would make the stadium more populated than all but four cities in the state of South Carolina. The official box score put the crowd attendance for that game at 80,172 — not 88,000.

The error was quickly called out online.

Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina lawmaker who is now a well-known political commentator on CNN, ripped into Trump for his claim.

“Donald Trump is lying. In South Carolina he did not have 88,000 people,” Sellers wrote on social media. “He showed up to a Carolina-Clemson game. Hell, I was there!!”

Other Trump appearances here in recent months drew tens of thousands, but not north of 80,000. His July 2023 outdoor rally in Pickens drew between 50,000-55,000, the town’s police chief was quoted as saying at the time.

Crowd size was not the only mention Trump made of the Palmetto State during his Aug. 8 press conference.

As he again cast doubts on the results of the 2020 presidential election, he zeroed in on his loss in Georgia. Trump questioned the outcome by comparing it to his electoral performance in neighboring states.

“I won Alabama by a record. Nobody’s ever gotten that many votes. I won South Carolina by a record,” Trump said. “You don’t win Alabama and South Carolina by a record and lose Georgia. It doesn’t happen.”

But he did.

After ballots were counted three times, including once by hand, Georgia’s certified election totals showed Trump lost to Joe Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast in Georgia.

In South Carolina, Trump defeated Biden by 293,562 votes. It was a smaller margin of victory than his 2016 triumph over Hillary Clinton.