Politics
Trump Says San Antonio Rally Was Like Nothing Ever Seen Before, Chairs Agree
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
SAN ANTONIO, TX: President Donald Trump wrapped up his rally at the Alamodome on Monday by informing the crowd, and by extension the nation, that nothing like this had ever happened in the history of human assembly, a statement that rally footage subsequently supported in the narrow technical sense that every room is unique.
Trump addressed the audience from the stage for just under ninety minutes, gesturing frequently at the seats behind him, which were visible, and occasionally at the seats in front of him, which were less populated than the campaign's advance team had projected, according to three people who were there and one person who watched the video twice and paused it.
"There's never been anything like it," Trump told the room. Fact-checkers reviewing the footage agreed this was almost certainly true.
The San Antonio venue holds approximately 65,000 people for a basketball game and slightly fewer for a political event, owing to the stage footprint and the buffer zone the Secret Service establishes so that the president is not too close to anyone sitting down. Drone footage circulating by Tuesday morning showed sections of the upper bowl that appeared to be observing the rally from a distance.
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt issued a statement saying the attendance had been "historic and unprecedented," which is a sentence that can be verified only by agreeing on a definition of "historic" and then not asking any follow-up questions.
The White House later clarified that the president had been referring to the energy in the room, which, as a quantity, cannot be photographed.
Local San Antonio resident Gary Fenwick, 54, who attended the rally with his brother-in-law, said the experience was "roomy." "We sat wherever we wanted," Fenwick said. "Normally you can't do that. We went back for seconds at the concession stand and our seats were still there waiting for us."
Political analysts noted that crowd size disputes have followed Trump to every major venue since 2017, when his inauguration photographs were described by his then-press secretary as showing "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period," a claim that was visually challenged by every camera pointed at the National Mall that morning, and which set a standard for creative arithmetic the campaign has maintained faithfully ever since.
Trump, for his part, appeared untroubled. He described the San Antonio crowd as bigger than Woodstock, bigger than the moon landing, and bigger than an event in Dallas in 2019 that he also described, at the time, as the biggest crowd in recorded history.
The chairs, which were all accounted for, had no comment.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-praises-attendance-texas-rally-what-videos-show-12539456