Former President Barack Obama joined Florida Democrats Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson at a joint campaign rally held last month at the Ice Palace in Miami. Gillum was the candidate for Governor, while Nelson was running for reelection in the Senate.
As you might expect, the house was packed. If there’s anything Barack Obama never had a problem with, it’s filling seats to hear him speak — it was a speech, in fact, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that positioned Obama for his run at the presidency just a few short years later. Public speaking was the main hallmark of his tenure in the White House.
Even knowing full well that Obama has literally never failed to fill an arena, let alone one that has a maximum capacity of 11,000 people like the Ice Palace, Donald Trump still attempted to claim today that he had “seen” Obama speaking, and that his crowd was tiny.
One can only assume Trump was still offended over videos that were released of his Texas rally with Ted Cruz, which showed hundreds and hundreds of empty seats and loads of people leaving the venue well before Trump’s speech had concluded. Whatever prompted his comments after the Obama rally, LA Times reporter Eli Stokols tweeted a passage of Trump’s remarks:
Trump claims he listened to Obama speak earlier. “He had a very small crowd, I have to be honest. They don’t tell you that.”
— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) November 2, 2018
Has there EVER been a President so obsessed with not just crowd size, but with his predecessor? Obama lives rent-free in the Tower condo in Trump’s mind, apparently.
Regardless of Trump’s opinion, Obama and the two Democrats he was stumping for had a very simple message, summed up best by the ex-Prez:
We can come together to shape our country’s course. That’s what Andrew Gillum stands for. That’s what Bill Nelson stands for. That’s what you can do when you vote on Tuesday.”
And although that Tuesday has come and gone and neither man won, the contests stretched out much longer in the counting than they should have for Republican-dominated areas with high Trump support. It means the elections were close, and we can never stop fighting.
Featured image via screen capture