The crowd at Harris and Walz’s Michigan rally was real | Fact check

An Aug. 10 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) shares a photo of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz exiting Air Force Two in front of a large crowd of supporters in Michigan on Aug. 7.
“Got to love it. Fake photo of the crowd,” reads text in the post, which shows a screenshot of another Facebook post. “Look in the reflection on the engines there is no one there!”
The post was shared more than 800 times in four days. Former President Donald Trump shared a similar picture in an Aug. 11 post on Truth Social and claimed Harris used AI to create the crowd.
“There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote. “She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people!”
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Images and videos from the Aug. 7 event show a large crowd was present to greet Harris and Walz.
The image in the post shows Harris and Walz, her runningmate, being greeted by thousands after arriving in Michigan for a campaign rally on Aug. 7. Footage of the event shows Harris descending the stairs of the plane in the same white jacket visible in the Facebook post.
Although Trump and other social media users claim images from the event were doctored to add in the crowd gathered to greet the pair, scores of images and videos from the Aug. 7 event prove the crowd was real.
C-SPAN’s recording of the event shows Harris and Walz shaking hands with rally attendees in front of Air Force Two as they make their way to the hangar where they gave speeches shortly after arriving. The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News also published videos and photos that show different angles of the large crowd in front of the plane and inside the hangar. And other journalists, political groups and attendees likewise shared footage of the rally from the crowd’s perspective. All show thousands of people in attendance.
Harris’ campaign said on X, formerly Twitter, that 15,000 people attended the rally.
That’s not to say all images of the event perfectly reflect reality. Some images of the circulating online from the event have been edited to some degree, said James O’Brien, a professor of computer science at the University of California Berkeley.
“These images have all been edited, but that’s not the same as being lies,” O’Brien said, pointing to the image in the Facebook post as an example.
The photo appears “to have a fake blur effect applied to it, but that could be because it looks nice and someone was being creative, or maybe it’s been added to hide some glitch in the image,” he said.
O’Brien also said the image Trump shared appears to have been edited, and it is possible someone manipulated the photos with AI.
As to the post’s claim that the plane reflection proves the image illegitimate, Chad Slattery, an independent aviation and aerospace photographer, told USA TODAY there’s a reason why the crowd doesn’t seem to appear in Air Force Two’s reflection.
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The lens the photographer used, the distance between the crowd and the plane and the curvature of the vessel – a Boeing C-32 – all play a part in the crowd’s reflection in the image, Slattery said.
“The photographer used a mid-length telephoto lens, which compresses distances,” he said. “The C-32A is actually farther than it appears. The engine nacelle and ventral fuselage are reflecting the tarmac; their curvatures make nearby objects look much farther away than they are, and in this case would not have reflected the crowd except as a row of dots at most.”
Slattery said this is the same phenomenon that makes objects in a car’s side-view mirrors appear farther away than they actually are. The mirror’s surface, like the plane, is curved.
USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook users who shared the post and Trump’s campaign for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
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