'That wasn't true': CNN catches Trump in lie about his crowd size

President Donald Trump's claim that "everybody" stayed until the end of his State Fair kickoff speech was false — and it revived a boast he has been making, and getting wrong, for years, according to a CNN fact-check by Daniel Dale.

Trump posted on social media on Thursday about the address he had delivered the previous day to launch the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

"Everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech because they loved hearing about a truly successful America," Trump wrote.

That wasn't accurate, Dale reported. Video posted by The Bulwark, a Trump-critical media outlet, showed dozens of people streaming out of the event roughly 17 minutes into the president's 28-minute address. CNN senior correspondent Donie O'Sullivan, who was on the scene interviewing attendees, said he saw hundreds of people heading for the exits while Trump was still speaking.

As Dale noted, there are plenty of unremarkable reasons people left. O'Sullivan said some attendees told him they had come to see the pre-speech military jet flyovers. The crowd for the officially nonpartisan 250th-anniversary event, held on the pedestrian-friendly Mall in the heavily Democratic capital, likely included more casual onlookers than a typical Trump rally. And, Dale acknowledged, most of the crowd did stay until the end — but Trump was the one who claimed "everybody" remained.

Dale wrote that it isn't clear whether Trump actually noticed people leaving or saw the Bulwark video. But he placed the claim in the context of what he described as Trump's long record as "a serial liar about trivial matters" and a chronic exaggerator of his crowd sizes and popularity, noting the president has proven highly sensitive to facts that puncture his cultivated image of singular magnetism.

The boast is a recycled one. Dale traced it back to Trump's 2024 campaign, when then-Vice President Kamala Harris said during their debate that people left his rallies early "out of exhaustion and boredom." Trump shot back that "people don't leave my rallies" and repeated variations of the claim at events in Arizona, North Carolina, and Michigan.

He wasn't correct then either, Dale reported, citing contemporaneous accounts from multiple outlets. The Detroit Free Press observed a Michigan crowd growing "noticeably thinner" during an 85-minute speech, while The New York Times described a "steady exodus" within minutes of a North Carolina speech days before the election. The Washington Post documented "scores of people" leaving early across many 2024 events, and The Guardian reported that roughly three in 10 attendees left a Georgia event before Trump finished.

None of those early departures stopped Trump from winning the election, Dale noted.

The fact-check also highlighted a revealing moment from a September 2024 Michigan rally, when Trump tangled himself in the claim in real time — beginning to acknowledge "the people that you see leaving," then catching himself to insist "nobody ever leaves," before adding that when they do, he finishes "up quick," and finally suggesting anyone getting up was merely lining up for backstage photos. As Dale put it, that monologue made clear the boast simply wasn't true.