What's Rattling Trump: The Size of Harris's Crowds

The numbers game is everything to Donald J. Trump. Vice President Kamala
Harris�s first big rally appears to have gotten under his skin.

By Shawn McCreesh

Reporting from Atlanta
Published Aug. 4, 2024Updated Aug. 5, 2024, 9:03 a.m. ET

When former President Donald J. Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in
Atlanta on Saturday, fog machines shot white plumes of smoke into the air,
heralding his arrival.

If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his
ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapors.

�Crazy Kamala,� he fumed a minute into his speech. �She was here a week ago
� lots of empty seats � but the crowd she got was because she had
entertainers.�

Four days earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had packed about the same
number of people (10,000) into the arena, the Georgia State University
Convocation Center. It was the first major rally of her newborn campaign,
and she had two rappers (Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion) on hand to hype up
her crowd.

Mr. Trump, who has been shunned by much of the entertainment industry, spun
this as somehow cheating in the all-important competition over crowd size.

�I don't need entertainers,� he said on Saturday. �I fill the stadium
because I�m making America great again.�

The numbers game has long been of paramount importance for Mr. Trump. As a
reality television star, he was obsessed with ratings (�What is it about me
that gets Larry King his highest ratings?� he wrote in one of his books).
This only intensified once he entered politics. He spent his first full day
in office as president trying to convince the news media that his
inauguration crowd was larger than the Women�s March. (It was not.)

The crowds he has drawn to his rallies this campaign season have been as
big as ever. Whether in blistering heat or deep freeze, his supporters line
up for hours beforehand to see him. Mr. Trump�s previous two rivals,
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, could never compete with him on this front.
What will it mean if his new challenger can?

Ms. Harris�s rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday, when she is expected to
unveil her running mate, is likely to be a blowout. After that, she�s going
on tour, holding rallies in western Wisconsin; Detroit; Raleigh, N.C.;
Savannah, Ga.; Phoenix; and Las Vegas. It�s all starting to screw with Mr.
Trump�s psyche.

In Atlanta, his surrogates reassured everyone that he was still the hottest
ticket in town. �I can feel the energy, whew,� said Representative Mike
Collins, Republican of Georgia. �The freakin� lines are longer this time.
The crowds are larger this time.�

�There�s still people piling in right now,� Burt Jones, Georgia�s
lieutenant governor, said. �It�s unbelievable.�
2024 Election: Live Updates
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Here�s the latest on the presidential race.
Harris has faced party divisions over her choice of running mate.
Jimmy Carter is said to have plans to vote for Kamala Harris.

Still, Mr. Trump couldn�t help but focus on those who weren�t piling in. He
claimed that Georgia State University officials in charge of the arena
prevented him from letting in more people. �We have beautiful cameras set
up for the overflow crowds,� he said. A massive screen flashed to a live
video feed of his red-capped supporters milling around outside in the 90-
degree heat.

In Mr. Trump�s telling, this wasn�t a safety protocol but a conspiracy to
humiliate him, perpetrated by the university and other nefarious forces. It
all connects, in his estimation, to the biggest numbers game he has ever
lost. �If they�re going to stand in the way of admitting people to our
rally, just imagine what they�re going to do on Election Day,� he said.

This goes to the core of Mr. Trump�s crowd-size fixation. He seems to
believe that a full arena is a predictor of his ultimate victory � as if
the voters in that arena were representative of the country at large. In
his first presidential campaign, Mr. Trump�s sizable rallies were evidence
of a swell of support the political establishment didn�t understand. �Look
at the love and adulation � this is like a poll,� he said in one revealing
moment in Atlanta. �We have thousands of people. That�s better than going
out and paying a half a million dollars to have some pollster go out and
poll 212 people.�

Thirty minutes into his speech, he became distracted again by the seating:
�There�s some seats right up there � they could let them come in.�

He complained about the venue to Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene,
Republican of Georgia, who was sitting in the front row: �It�s obviously,
Marjorie, a very liberal school, I guess, right? I�m not happy with the
school.� He claimed that �they don�t want to show that we�re successful.�

And then he was back, once again, on Ms. Harris and her crowd size. �She
has to go get entertainers,� he repeated. �They start leaving as soon as
she opens her mouth.�

This seemed like pure projection. If Mr. Trump had looked up from his
teleprompter at any point during the second half of his 90-minute speech,
he would have seen his own supporters slipping out of their bright blue
seats, headed for the exits. Slowly but surely, across every stand and in
every section, they streamed out. Stage left, a man in a star-spangled
cowboy hat sidled down his row at the halfway mark. Two men holding signs
bearing Mr. Trump�s mugshot tiptoed up their aisle a minute later. A young
woman led her family away just as Mr. Trump started to falsely tell them
that �Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who murdered Laken Riley.�

This happens at every rally, to a degree. And it is more a factor of the
time commitment involved than any sort of discontent with his message.
Supporters show up, get their photos for Facebook of the man in the arena
and, at some point during his discursive stemwinders, decide that they�ve
heard enough and that it�s time to go eat.

Still, an hour into his speech, the Atlanta crowd had emptied out more than
usual. (Like Madonna, he often keeps his crowds waiting for an hour or more
past the scheduled start time, which doesn�t help the situation.) Large
splotches of blue had blossomed across the upper stands, and people on the
floor had started to sneak away, too.

Mr. Trump�s most faithful followers were also feeling defensive about the
dueling rally discourse on Saturday.

�I think there was just a little bit of hype for her as she first comes
out, but I think that�s going to die out,� said Mark Adent, 57, the
executive vice president of a printing company in Atlanta.

But there was something about Ms. Harris�s star turn at the same arena that
had unsettled Mr. Trump. He seemed to be pining for the glory days of his
first campaign, back when his rollicking rallies were but a harbinger of a
stunning victory to come. He said that seeing two rappers open for Ms.
Harris reminded him of how Mrs. Clinton used musicians to help summon the
kinds of crowds he could command with ease.

�She got the idea from Hillary,� he told his supporters. �Hillary got Bruce
Springsteen, I�ll never forget, and the place was pretty full.�

�Not full like our places are full,� he quickly added. �I don�t have a
guitar. But our places are bigger � we get more people than anybody. I
don�t care how many guitars they have.�

Just kill him.

https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/mdjonline.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/f/f3/ff314256-5d92-11ea-9e5f-8bd590e9fab7/5e5ec743f049e.image.jpg?resize=225%2C301
Dandre Shabazz

A man who was convicted of raping a dozen women in Atlanta over a three-year period has been sentenced to 12 consecutive life terms.

Dandre Shabazz, 56, was sentenced March 3 by Fulton County Superior Court Senior Judge Alford Dempsey, who presided over the case. Feb. 26, Shabazz was convicted by a jury of rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, aggravated assault with deadly weapon, aggravated sodomy and aggravated child molestation in several incidents involving 12 female victims.

According to a news release, all of the rapes took place between 2002 and 2005 in locations in the southwest Atlanta area.

♦ Jan. 24, 2002: one victim — 1109 Windsor St.

♦ April 10, 2002: one victim — 1256 Sylvan Road

♦ June 17, 2002: one victim — Perkerson Park

♦ Aug. 21, 2002: two victims — Perkerson Park

♦ Aug. 24, 2002: one victim — Perkerson Park

♦ Dec. 21, 2002: one victim — 3481 Atlanta Industrial Park

♦ March 28, 2003: one victim — Perkerson Park

♦ March 31, 2004: one victim — 1182 Sims St.

♦ May 21, 2004: two victims — 1189 McDaniel St.

♦ March 26, 2005: one victim — 958 Arthur St.

“Shabazz is a violent serial rapist who targeted young African-American females who were alone late at night,” the release stated. “Shabazz specifically focused upon women who were struggling and in many cases were sex workers. During the attacks, Shabazz utilized a gun and did not wear a condom.”

DNA evidence collected from some of the sexual assault kits from Shabazz’s victims that were stored at Grady Memorial Hospital helped crack the cold case. They were part of the group of about 1,500 backlogged kits that went untested for, in some cases, as many as 15 years until federal grant funding and a new Georgia law required they be examined.

The Fulton County district attorney’s office played a major role in recovering and transporting the kits to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) for testing.

In 2017, the GBI notified the district attorney’s office of a Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) match between Shabazz and a sexual assault kit collected in 2003. Shabazz was later matched to the kits collected from the remaining victims in this case.

He was indicted by a Fulton County grand jury in 2018. Shabazz was serving a prison sentence in North Carolina for robbery and other related charges and, without this indictment, was expected to be released in September 2019.

This case was prosecuted by the Fulton district attorney’s office’s sexual assault kit initiative task force. The group was formed in March 2018, as a result of a $1 million U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance Grant. The Fulton district attorney’s office was one of only five district attorney’s offices nationwide to receive the award. The task force is dedicated to exclusively investigating and indicting cases resulting from CODIS matches.

“This man was a violent and ruthless serial rapist,” Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. said in the release. “Because rape kits were not tested in a timely manner, he was allowed not only to continue to prey upon the women of our community, but he almost got away with his brutal crimes, scot-free. I am thankful to all of the people who worked so hard to get these rape kits tested. The criminal justice system should never allow rape kits to go untested again.”

https://www.mdjonline.com/neighbor_newspapers/a-man-has-been-sentenced-to-12-life-sentences-for-a-dozen-atlanta-rapes/article_b87045fe-5d8a-11ea-8281-87880329b0e4.html