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Bruce Springsteen fans have denounced Donald Trump as a “moron” after he claimed that his Jersey Shore rally garnered a larger crowd than the singer could pull.
The 77-year-old former president arrived at his Wildwood, New Jersey rally on Saturday evening which was swamped with approximately 80,000 Maga supporters, according to his campaign officials.
Alongside a flurry of expletives and praising fictional flesh-eating serial killer Hannibal Lecter before pivoting to talk about illegal migration, Mr Trump also took a jibe at a New Jersey icon: Bruce Spingsteen.
“I love these Saturday evenings. Is there anything better than a Trump rally? If some of these wackos came along, you know, these liberal singers, they’d actually vote for me,” he gloated to the crowd.
“You know, like Bruce Springsteen. We have a much bigger crowd than Bruce Springsteen. Right?,” Mr Trump added.
The Trump campaign has previously been criticised for inflating crowd sizes, and Mr Spingsteen’s fans were quick to poke holes in the Republican’s latest figures.
Between 30 August and 3 September last year, the rock singer and his E Street Band sold out three performances at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. Its seating capacity alone is 82,500 according to its website.
“Trump really said his Wildwood rally had a bigger crowd than Bruce Springsteen… someone tell this moron that The Boss sold out MetLife for 3 nights at 82,500 a night,” one X, formerly Twitter, user said.
“If this was a real crowd of my fellow New Jerseyans, and not a bunch of brainwashed posers, there is no chance they would have allowed this Bruce [Springsteen] slander to stand,” another wrote.
While Mr Springsteen, who is public in his support for president Joe Biden and called Mr Trump’s 2020 first term in the White House a “f****** nightmare”, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said that the singer would “actually vote” for him if he attended the rally.
The ex-president brazenly claims that the Republicans are going to win New Jersey, despite it being a stronghold for the Democrats for the past eight elections; since 1992.
“As you can see, today, we’re expanding the electoral map because we are going to officially play in the state of New Jersey,” Mr Trump said.
“We’re going to win the state of New Jersey.”
Mr Trump also took aim at Mr Biden, branding him a “total moron”, and slamming Justice Juan Merchan, the Judge overseeing his hush money case 200 miles away in a New York City courthouse, as “highly conflicted”.
It comes as his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, is expeected to testify in Mr Trump’s criminal trial on Monday. He has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, for allegedly covering up a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels to silence her about an alleged 2006 affair ahead of the 2016 election.
Mr Trump denies both the affair and the charges against him.