Trump compares his Jan. 6 crowd to the audience for MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Donald Trump has long boasted about crowd sizes at his rallies, but on Thursday, he used an unexpected comparison when making the case he is the biggest draw: Martin Luther King Jr.

“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said at his news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”

The answer came in response to a question the former president received about whether or not he thought the conclusion of his term could be considered a peaceful transfer of power, even though it was marked by the Jan. 6 insurrection.

As he has previously, Trump said the people who have been arrested as a result of storming the Capitol have been treated unfairly. Then, unprompted, he compared the “Stop the Steal” rally he had before the protesters marched towards the Capitol to King’s “I have a Dream” speech, which was held at the same location.

Trump acknowledged that official estimates put his crowd size as smaller than King's, but he said he thought he had "more people."

“But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same — because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington — and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd…we actually had more people," he said.

The congressional Jan. 6 committee pegged Trump’s crowd at 53,000 people, about one-fifth of the 250,000 who were estimated to be at King’s famous address from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The NAACP on Thursday posted photos from both days on X and said of Trump's crowd comparison: "Not only is that completely false, but here’s what