No, Roger Stone’s crowd photo isn’t from Trump’s Wildwood rally. It’s from a Rod Stewart concert.
Trump spoke to thousands at the Jersey Shore, but his former adviser posted a photo of millions attending a free concert in 1994 in Brazil.
Once again, crowd size at a gathering for former President Donald Trump has become an matter of intense debate.
On Sunday, Republican political operative Roger Stone posted an image of a huge throng gathered on a beach, representing it as a photo of the crowd that had been listening to former President Donald Trump’s rally in Wildwood on Saturday — a group estimated as numbering between 40,000 to 100,000, according to differing reports.
Stone, a former Trump adviser, accompanied the photo with the caption: “Yeah, New Jersey is in play for @realDonaldTrump. Could Joe Biden draw a crowd like this?”
In reality, it was a shot of a free concert Rod Stewart had given in Rio de Janeiro in 1994, in front of an estimated 3.5 million to 4 million people.
Many folks from South Jersey likely realized that the mountains depicted in the shot do not slope dramatically into the Atlantic Ocean near Morey’s Piers. And plenty of people everywhere got the sense that something was off.
But when individuals then took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to excoriate Stone, Newsweek reported on Monday, Stone wrote, “Liberals have no sense of humor. 10,000 people at the New Jersey shore is still 10,000 people.”
That reportedly angered Trump’s campaign, which believes Stone was underestimating a crowd they counted as around 100,000.
Using a crowd-count tool known as Mapchecking, Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise, an initiative by the Poynter Institute to help people spot misinformation, scanned the Wildwood group and stated, “The most generous crowd size I could give is 41,000.”
That dovetails with what Wildwood Mayor Ernie Troiano Jr. said last week, when he explained that the beachfront area serving as the rally’s venue could hold up to 40,000 people.
Whatever the true number was, not everyone sees what Stone did as a joke.
“This could effectively fool people,” said Matt Stamm, an expert in manipulated media at Drexel University’s College of Engineering. A great deal of misinformation connected to photos doesn’t come from touching up images, but from simply putting different captions under real pictures without any technical expertise, he added.
As pervasive as social media is, Stamm said, “it’s still relatively new, and we haven’t build up the right way to judge what we see. We are used to seeing truth in print, and in believing the images we see are true.
“We are still not used to an era where images can be falsified.”
Why does any of this matter?
“Crowd size has always been associated with how much support a candidate has,” said Mahadevan. “So, here Stone is trying to influence the election.”
Trump pardoned Stone in 2020 after he’d been convicted in 2019 of making false statements, obstruction, and witness tampering as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Stone believes you “flood the zone with falsehoods,” according to Mahadevan. “That means that even if you claim you’re joking,” he added, “you are crowding out the truth.”
For Trump, a former TV showman, crowds have long been vital as a barometer of his popularity. He famously had his spokesperson overstate the number of people who attended Trump’s inauguration after it was pointed out that former President Barack Obama had attracted a greater number of onlookers.
Regardless of how many fans Trump enticed onto the Wildwood sands, many Jerseyites may not have been too happy about his boast that his rally at the boardwalk was bigger than a Bruce Springsteen concert.
One fan of the Boss dismissed the statement as “slander.”