Former President Donald Trump continued his obsession with crowd sizes on Sunday, claiming photos showing a large crowd outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ rally in Detroit last week were created by AI, but a photographer in attendance confirmed to The Daily Beast that the images captured by his camera were very real.

“Did anyone notice that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday. “There was no one at the plane and she ‘rigged’ it using artificial intelligence to show a huge ‘crowd’ of so-called supporters BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was flagged by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd image but there was no one there, later confirmed by the reflection off the mirror-like surface of the Vice President’s plane. She is a CHEAT. She had NO ONE waiting and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing happens with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches.”

Trump then shared another photo of the August 7 crowd from a distance, again claiming it was a “fake ‘crowd.'”

The former president’s sudden posts added fuel to a growing right-wing conspiracy that apparently began Saturday, when far-right filmmaker and election denier Dinesh D’Souza posted a photo from the rally on his X account with parts of the plane’s fuselage circled.

“Look at the reflection in the airplane,” he wrote. “Does it look like a real picture to you?”

Trump stuck to that story, even though there were numerous photos and videos from the rally showing thousands of people waiting for the arrival of Harris and her vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The press captured nearly every angle of the event, from scenes of Harris and Walz on the steps of Air Force Two to the two addressing the raucous crowd from the stage.

Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnik covered Wednesday’s rally and told the Daily Beast that the crowd was “clearly large enough” to spill onto the pavement. The campaign also set up large LED screens so attendees could see and hear the speeches.

“It was a big crowd, and the pictures I took that are on the Getty website are testament to that,” says Harnik.

Andrew Harnik/Getty

Harnik explains that he used a zoom lens, a camera attachment commonly used by photographers that allows them to change the framing of a scene without moving from their location. A high-quality zoom lens allows a photographer to capture a subject from a distance, but it can give photos a “flat” look and make the subject appear much closer than it is – in this case, an airplane in front of a crowd.

“The plane is actually quite far away from the crowd,” adds Harnik.

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Andrew Harnik

The Getty Images photographer has covered politics for decades, including Trump’s previous presidential campaigns. He says photographers simply capture what’s in front of them – without fear or favoritism: “We keep our own opinions to ourselves and only document what we see in front of us.”

The effort appeared to be part of Trump’s bid to define the role of the vice president after she rose to the top of the candidacy last month, giving Democrats new momentum and sparking a surge in financial and political support. New York Times Polls on Saturday showed Harris ahead of Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, contributing to an alleged outburst of anger by Trump in private that has now leaked out to the public.

“EVERYTHING ABOUT KAMALA IS FAKE!” Trump wrote in another Truth Social post on Sunday.

The Trump and Harris campaigns did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment. Harris’ senior adviser David Plouffe wrote that Trump’s falsehoods were “not conspiratorial rants from the deepest recesses of the internet” but those of someone who “could hold the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades.”