Videos Appear to Show Empty Seats at Donald Trump’s Long Island Rally

Recently released video footage appears to show dozens of empty seats toward the end of former President Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech at a Long Island Campaign rally.
The 16,000-seat Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum was packed at the beginning of the rally, with thousands more in the overflow area outside, watching the event on large screens.
But X user @19joho posted three clips on Wednesday, each showing many empty seats at three different parts of Trump’s 84-minute speech.
Trump frequently mentions crowd sizes of his rallies, whether in his speeches or in posts on Truth Social. During the debate on September 10, Vice President Kamala Harris had said that people were “leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” To which Trump replied “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Newsweek has contacted Trump’s campaign for comment outside of regular office hours.
One of the three clips, which according to what Trump is saying corresponds to the 28th minute of his speech, shows a largely full house but with some empty seats along the top sections.
Another clip opens with Trump saying, “make your product in America, and only in America,” which corresponds, according to a YouTube video of the speech, to the 74th minute. It pans along the top seating section of the area, showing many empty seats in some of the top sections.
The clip, from six minutes later in the speech, appears to show even more empty seats along the top, and some sections almost entirely empty. This clip begins with Trump saying, “what our nation would be with no Ukraine War, no October 7th,” which corresponds to the 80th minute of his speech, four minutes from its conclusion.
During Wednesday’s speech, the former president mentioned the size of the crowd at three different points.
The first thing he said was: “Wow, this is a big crowd, this is a big crowd, thank you very much everybody.”
He next mentioned it 32 minutes into the speech, during a section where he appears to be promoting his wife Melania’s new book and talking about him describing his crowd sizes to her.
“She just wrote a book called Melania. Go out and buy it, it’s great. And if she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and I’ll say don’t buy it, get rid of it. No, but she said to me, I said ‘baby, did you see the crowd? We had 18,000 people. We could have filled it up three or four times.'”
“Nobody could draw crowds like me, nobody, not even close. I’m the greatest of all time maybe.”
He mentioned it again in the 59th minute, during an anecdote about a boy called Liam.
“I brought him presents, I said ‘Liam do you think the crowd of 20,000, plus a lot of people outside,’ you know we put up big televisions on the back of the building, but that’s not like being here. It’s wonderful. Hello out there. I hope you’re enjoying it. Big, big, beautiful screens. We have big screens, not quite like being in the third row, first row, but Liam La Castro is here, and he is a great young man.”
Several Trump supporters posted footage of the packed crowd before and at the beginning of the event. These photos have gone viral, prompting talks of a potential surprise presidential election victory in the state of New York.
“When I told some people in Washington that I’m going up to New York, we’re doing a campaign speech, they said, ‘What do you mean New York? You can’t ever … Republicans can’t win New York,” Trump told the crowd.
“I said, ‘I can win New York,'” he continued. “We can win New York. We’re going to win New York…Your love for your state will come roaring back.”