Donald Trump has been roasted for claiming that the audience at the presidential debate with Kamala Harris “went crazy” for him – despite the fact that there was no live audience present.
The former president often claims his crowd sizes are huge – even wildly asserting he drew in a bigger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr during the March on Washington – but this time, he appeared to go even further by claiming there was one at all.
Appearing on Wednesday’s episode of Gutfeld!, Trump hit out at the ABC News’ debate’s moderators, arguing they “corrected everything I said practically.”
“They didn’t correct her once. And they corrected me, everything I said, practically. I think nine times or 11 times,” he told Greg Gutfeld.
Trump then referred to the nonexistent audience.
“And the audience was absolutely– they went crazy,” he said.
One of the rules of the September 10 debate was that there would be no live audience, in addition to the candidate’s microphones being switched off when they weren’t answering questions and that they could not wear earpieces.
Social media went into a frenzy following Trump’s comments on the Fox News show .
“Um… er… what audience?” wrote one X user.
Another claimed the comments pointed to Trump suffering cognitive decline: “Delusional, senile.”
Someone else suggested a reason for the presidential candidate’s apparent confusion: “Not an audience, but you could hear people in the room laughing at ‘they’re eating the dogs…‘. I think it was the crew.”
Speaking to Gutfeld, Trump later pointed to the TV ratings from the debate.
“We had 75 million people watching, something like that, and you have to do well,” he said.
It is unclear if Trump was referring to the TV ratings when he spoke about the “crazy” audience.
Trump also doubled down on his insistence that he had a “great debate” – despite the findings in polls and comments made by members of his own party.
“I walked off, I said: ‘That was a great debate, I loved it.’ You know you got a lot of people watching,” he said.
In the aftermath of the debate, Trump quickly claimed he “won.”
But, even some of his closest GOP allies acknowledged that Harris came out on top.
“Make no mistake about it, Trump had a bad night,” Brit Hume said on Fox News at the time.
“We heard so many of the old grievances that we long thought that Trump had learned were not winners, politically,” he added.
A CNN snap poll conducted by SSRS found 63 percent of registered voters believed Harris had won – nearly double the number of people who thought Trump did (37 percent).
Also on Gutfeld!, Trump claimed Harris’s running mate Tim Walz called the former president during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, begging the then-president to tell his supporters that they were friends after they surrounded his home.
“He called up years ago, I was in the White House, and he said, ‘My house is being surrounded by people with American flags’,” Trump said, adding that he responded: “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? He said, ‘I think they’re going to attack me.’”
The Republican presidential candidate continued: “He said, ‘could you put out a word, like, that I’m your friend?’”
“I don’t even know him, but that’s the only time I ever spoke to him,” he added, claiming he put out a post on Twitter, now known as X, praising Walz in an effort to protect him.
A newly-surfaced phone call from the time undermines Trump’s version of events