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Size matters, and it matters to Donald Trump more than most. Trump kicked off his presidency by exaggerating the modest turnout at his inauguration; now, he’s desperate to diminish the crowds showing up for his 2024 opponent.

Over the weekend, the former president posted on Truth Social a typically unhinged rant about the large crowds at Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent rallies. But instead of simply attributing the high turnout to guest spots from the likes of Megan Thee Stallion, as he has done previously, Trump went a step further and claimed Harris’s campaign is using AI to digitally forge huge crowds. (As proof, he offered a tweet from a right-wing strategist, which has since been community-noted into oblivion.) Trump’s claim has sent an unmistakable signal to supporters not to trust their lying eyes about Harris’s surging popularity, and the message quickly resonated on TikTok. It’s something both he and those supporters may soon come to regret.

Well before Trump’s weekend post on Truth Social, he has been openly obsessed with the robust turnout at Harris’s rallies. He spent an ill-advised chunk of time last week reiterating the size of his own crowds at a hastily assembled press conference, culminating in a pants-on-fire claim that the attendance at his January 6, 2021, speech dwarfed the crowds that turned out for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.

The escalation of accusing Harris of digitally manipulating a crowd photo is just the latest, and perhaps most significant, proof of how much the Democrat pivot from President Biden to VP Harris has upended Trump’s campaign.

Until just recently, the difference in crowd size between the candidates at the top of each ticket was a red-hot data point confirming a substantial enthusiasm gap. Biden was not exactly packing out his sparse campaign events, even before the disastrous debate performance that prompted his exit from the race. In contrast with Trump supporters, many of whom are demonstrably fired up about their candidate, a CBS/YouGov poll from June found that a majority of Democratic voters were mainly fired up about defeating Trump. Lackluster support for Biden himself made it easy for Trump to claim, yet again, that the only way he could lose would be if his opponent cheated.

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel back in May. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

Fox News echoed Trump’s suspicions of imminent cheating as Biden continued to drag down the prospects of a Democrat victory, with host Greg Gutfeld asking in June: “If by some weird, miraculous chance [Biden wins,] how do you convince anyone that’s real?”

Now that Trump is squaring off against an opponent who is legitimately popular in her own right—or at least one who has benefited tremendously from novelty and newness—the enthusiasm gap looks more like a patched-up pothole. With Harris drawing crowds of 15,000 or more at her events, Trump no longer has a charisma-vacuum counterpart he can point to as an inexplicable victor. Whining that crowds only turn out for marquee guests like Megan Thee Stallion wasn’t getting any traction—perhaps because it was an admission that people were, in fact, turning out—so now Trump has found an expedient way to account for those crowds: AI.

The rapidly developing AI space has primed us for the possibility of disinformation in this election, but mostly in the form of people passing off AI images as real. The hype around text-to-image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney has left us ill-prepared to respond to hoaxers trying to pass off real images as AI. Many Trump supporters might readily believe claims that visual confirmation of an inconvenient fact is actually fake. As scary as it may have been to imagine what the guy who once altered a hurricane path with a Sharpie could do with recent AI capabilities, it turns out Trump doesn’t even need them in order to turn AI into a weapon.

AI appears poised to become Trump’s new “fake news.” For nearly a decade now, his use of the latter phrase has generally been enough to debunk any reported story in the eyes of his followers. Many of them still believe the 2020 election was stolen, that Trump never said there were “very fine people on both sides” about the deadly Charlottesville rally, and that the many indictments against him are all political attacks with no merit. Given that context, believing that the Harris campaign would digitally alter some photos isn’t that far of a stretch.

Up until this past weekend, many Trump supporters seemed to believe that the Harris hype was just in its honeymoon phase and would blow over soon. Now, Trump has given them permission to not believe that the hype ever existed at all. 

Unfortunately for Trump, if his followers buy into this latest falsehood, it may affect him adversely as well.

Many of Trump’s supporters seem to be living in a bubble right now. For instance, some conservative pundits argue that Tim Walz has been so damaged by Republican attacks that he may be on the verge of dropping out, when in reality none of those attacks have prevented Walz from enjoying a phenomenally successful rollout. Living inside an info-environment claiming Walz has already been neutralized is going to leave some Trump supporters woefully unprepared for what may be coming in November. Some of them might even believe Harris is so unpopular that Trump’s victory is all but assured, and that they can comfortably stay home on election day.

If Trump supporters living in a bubble actually do depress the vote, though, it would be a perfect bookend to his political career. After all, part of the reason Trump got elected in the first place was because Hillary Clinton supporters were living in a bubble. And as Mark Twain famously said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

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