Column: What Trump's crowd obsession says about him -- and the race for the White House

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

76% : "I've spoken to the biggest crowds," Trump boasted at last week's look-at-me-please news conference.
64% : But there's no question that Trump is struggling to recalibrate and acclimate to a startling new political reality.
53% : "What is demonstrable -- and the reason Trump has gone even more bonkers than usual -- is that Harris has been drawing much bigger crowds than Trump or President Biden, whose campaign, before exiting, was a Democratic exercise in making the best of a funereal situation.
51% : George Artz, a longtime observer of Trump, believes his crowd-size convulsions are telling.
48% : (Trump, who's been know to shave strokes to improve his golf game and add phantom floors to increase the size of his skyscrapers, once called the practice "truthful hyperbole."
40% : For now, Democrats are taking great glee in trolling Trump, posting side-by-side photos of his and Harris' rallies and urging her supporters to turn out en masse, just to get inside Trump's head -- which has proved not at all difficult, given his long-standing crowd-count obsession.
38% : Others would describe it more simply as "lying.")The impulse to exaggerate -- and vent his frustration in run-on sentences with odd punctuation and random capitalization -- is a sure sign Trump is in a swivet.
38% : The Crowd Counting Consortium, a nonpartisan academic organization that tracks political gatherings across the U.S. -- estimates Trump has drawn an average crowd of about 5,600 at this year's events.
35% : His opponent is no longer a doddering 81-year-old throwback but his surging, future-facing replacement, who is 19 years younger than Trump and, for the moment, a far more captivating political figureThe former president, who requires attention the way others need oxygen, can't stand being relegated to a mere afterthought.
13% : Trump bleated in one post, claiming the hordes were actually AI-generated fakes.

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