What did Donald Trump say about Martin Luther King Jr.? MLK's daughter Bernice slams ex-president's "I Have a Dream” speech comparison

On Thursday, August 8, 2024, former President Donald Trump held a news conference at his Mar-A-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. During the conference, Trump was asked if he considered the end of his term in 2020 a peaceful transfer of responsibilities and his perspective on the January 6 US Capitol attack.

In response, the former President compared the crowd at his rally to the one present when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his popular "I have a dream" speech in Washington back in 1963. He said:

"If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech... and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. They said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people... And you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd, my friend, we actually had more people."

This comparison clearly didn't sit right with the iconic civil rights leader's daughter, Bernice. On August 9, 2024, she tweeted:

"Absolutely not true. I really wish that people would stop using my father to support fallacy."

In a follow-up tweet, Bernice further shared a photo of the crowd that attended MLK's famous speech back in the day.

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Are Trump's claims about the 2021 rally being more crowded than the time Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech true?

For the unversed, "I have a dream" is a popular public speech given by MLK back in August 1963, during the Great March on Washington. In this iconic speech, King spoke about ending racism across the US and called for civil and economic rights for all. The speech became one of the most famous ones in American history and an important moment in the civil rights movement.

AllHipHop reported that about 250,000 people attended to hear King's speech in 1963. In contrast, according to the House Select Committee investigation, only about 53,000 people were part of the rally that happened in January 2021, after Donald Trump lost the election and Joe Biden became the President of the United States.

Thus, Trump's recent claims about the size of the January 6 rally compared to King's speech were not true. As mentioned, the same was debunked by MLK's daughter, Bernice, as well. She was, however, not the only one to call out the former president for his claims. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights organization also took to X.

In a tweet posted on August 9, the organization shared two photos- one from the January 2021 rally and one from the crowd attending MLK's speech. The tweet was further captioned:

"Donald Trump just said that he had a bigger crowd on January 6 than Dr. Martin Luther King did when he delivered 'I Have A Dream.' ... Not only is that completely false, but here’s what is more important: MLK’s speech was about democracy. Trump’s was about tearing it down."

Several netizens, too, lashed out at the former president for his statement about the comparison.