PARK TOWNSHIP, Mich. — For much of the last two years, American politics at its most divisive, ideological and angry had dominated the previously unremarkable work of county government in the place that Jim Barry called home.

Now it was primary day, and the voters of Ottawa County, a fast-growing, middle-class community of about 300,000 people on the shores of Lake Michigan, were headed to the polls.

Barry, who described himself as a moderate in the mold of former president and Michigan Republican Gerald Ford, was running for a seat on the 11-member county board and hoping that voters in Ottawa, which former president Donald Trump had carried in 2020 by 21 percentage points, might be ready to embrace a different kind of politics.

“I’m not sure Ronald Reagan could pass some of the conservative purity tests in the modern era,” Barry said.

He was standing on a busy street corner wearing a red, white and blue football jersey that said, “Elect Jim Barry,” and waving a sign with the same message. Some drivers honked and gave him a thumbs-up. Others scowled. His wife thought she spotted his opponent, who lived nearby, amid the thrum of traffic.

In 2022, eight hard-line Republicans, channeling Trump-style anger over pandemic-era mask mandates, had won seats on the board, defeating more moderate GOP candidates. The new commissioners had swept into office promising to “thwart tyranny” and defend the county from dark forces that had supposedly infiltrated their local government to promote abortion, sexualize the county’s children and corrupt its deeply held Christian morals.

The transformation made Ottawa a case study in what happens when local government is buffeted by the same ideological battles and dissolution of trust that have afflicted national institutions for much of the last eight years. In a series of stories over the last 18 months, The Washington Post chronicled the changes in the county.

Board meetings, which had once been sleepy affairs, often stretched on for five hours or more as residents lined up to deliver their views on the Bible, drag-queen story hours and the safety of vaccines. The majority’s beliefs had shaped policy, with real-world impacts on the lives of Ottawa residents, and spawned costly litigation.

Two years after their stunning victory, the far-right commissioners were running on a simple rallying cry that spoke to their fears for their country and community: “Protect the Kids.”

Barry, a 69-year-old real estate agent, said he understood why so many in the community had been upset by the mask mandates. But he didn’t believe county government was the place to wage heated battles over divisive national political issues, like abortion, racism and sexuality. Instead, he wanted the county government to return its focus to issues like water quality and the high cost of housing.

“It’s not as exciting as trying to do something about transgender athletes in high school sports,” he said. “But there’s no purview for the county board of commissioners in that.”

Barry, who had been standing on the side of the road, off and on, since 7:30 a.m., checked his watch. “We’re coming up on 6 [p.m.],” he said. It was almost time to get ready for his election night party.

After all the turmoil and county board meetings in which neighbors regularly called each other fascists, communists, Nazis and Christian nationalists, Barry wondered if there was a way to pull back from so much of the vitriol consuming the country. In a few hours, he and the people of Ottawa County would have their answer.

A ‘God-briefed’ candidate

Twenty-five miles to the east, on the opposite side of the county, Rachel Atwood corralled voters outside her polling place. She was part of the slate of hard-line Republicans trying to keep control of the board. Her group, Ottawa Impact, dominated the county GOP.

“Do you need a Republican voter guide?” she asked as people passed by.

Atwood, 43, got involved in county politics because she believed that mask requirements were hurting her autistic son at a critical moment in his development. The mandates were over, but Atwood thought that the threats to her children’s well-being from the government and pro-LGBTQ+ liberals remained as real as ever.

“What makes me a little different in this race is that my experience is much more geared toward the current culture war,” she told a local television station.

She was running in the Republican primary against John Teeples, a retired attorney, who described himself as a “fiscal conservative” intent on restoring “kindness” to the county’s politics.

The night before the primary, Atwood and the other Ottawa Impact candidates each occupied one of the four geographic corners of the county and prayed for the protection of their community. Her skin was deeply tanned, the product of knocking on more than 2,000 doors — an experience that she described as transformative.

“God has been sending people to me through door-knocking to say things to me that are supernatural, that are God-briefed,” Atwood said in a recent Facebook live video from the campaign trail. She prayed with dozens of people who had autistic children or close relatives with the condition, she said, and promised them she would fight for more county services for their loved ones.

Atwood also said she had encountered constituents who told her they were exhausted by the infighting in the county. On their first day in office, the Ottawa Impact commissioners had fired the county’s administrator, canned its lawyer of 40 years, closed its diversity office and dumped its motto “Where you Belong” in favor of “Where Freedom Rings.”

More change — which Ottawa Impact opponents called chaos — followed. The new commissioners forced the county’s longtime sex educator, who had developed successful programs to lower teen pregnancy and curb the spread of sexually transmitted infections, into an administrative job. When their efforts to remove the county’s public health director were blocked by the courts, they cut the health department’s budget, eliminating a program that helped feed 22,000 low-income residents each year.

They turned down millions of dollars in federal and state grants because they came with conditions that the commissioners said were unconstitutional or immoral, and they became embroiled in a spate of lawsuits alleging discrimination.

Joe Moss, who co-founded Ottawa Impact and chairs the county board, didn’t respond to a request for comment. In an interview with a local television station, he described the new board members as regular people — teachers, entrepreneurs, nurses, social workers — who were acting as “guardrails” to defend the county’s children from “dangerous and harmful” forces.

Atwood disagreed with those who insisted that Ottawa Impact had hurt the community by introducing anger and division into the otherwise mundane world of county government.

“I’m happy people have become so engaged,” she said.

Outside her polling place a couple of supporters approached her and asked for a selfie. Atwood smiled and posed alongside them. “We’re praying for you,” they told her.

An anxious wait

That evening, candidates and their backers gathered at election night parties where they compulsively checked the county’s website for early returns.

Barry waited for the results with Rep. Bill Huizenga (R), the local congressman and his half brother, who had rented an event space at an upscale waterfront restaurant. The siblings stood together near the restaurant’s deck as the sun set over Lake Michigan, smartphones in hand.

Just after 9:30 p.m. the county clerk sent a text alert that early results were in, prompting nearly 4,000 people to ping the county’s website within 30 seconds. The flood of traffic crashed the site.

“We are aware of the website issues,” the county clerk posted on his social media pages. “A lot of folks interested in our results!”

The primary’s unusually high stakes made for unusual alliances. An older man in a red “Make America Great Again” hat sat with friends at an election night pizza party for Mark Northrup, a small-town mayor challenging Moss in the Republican primary. A few feet away, Jacqui Poehlman, one of Northrup’s volunteers, hunched over a computer with a “Bans off our bodies” sticker on it.

Northrup, 66, described himself as a “pro-life” Republican who planned to support Trump, his party’s candidate for the presidency. Poehlman, 43, described herself as “very liberal.” But they shared views on the value of well-funded public schools, the need for more affordable housing and the necessity of preventing Ottawa Impact from retaining its majority on the board. Both fervently believed that scorched-earth political warfare, which had become the standard at the national level, was causing irreparable harm when injected into their otherwise peaceful and prosperous community.

“Trump is his guy in the fight,” Poehlman said of Northrup. “But we’re not voting for Trump at the county level.”

At the Ottawa Impact party, Atwood sat at a table with her friends in a rustic banquet hall, with strings of white lights hanging from the rafters. At the front of the room, Moss introduced a video of Ottawa Impact candidates on the campaign trail. There were pictures of smiling children, pickup trucks and American flags flapping in the breeze. In the background a Christian contemporary music star sang: “We’re the generation that has to make a choice/ Will we push against this evil or will we watch while it destroys?”

Most of the parties began to break up around 11 p.m., before all the precincts had reported. Barry headed home with a comfortable lead over Gretchen Cosby, a 60-year-old former nurse who had been inspired to get into politics by her false belief that Democrats had stolen the 2020 election. Around midnight the results posted online. Barry won with 63 percent of the vote.

The three Ottawa Impact candidates running for countywide office — prosecutor, sheriff and treasurer — lost to more moderate Republicans by about 20 percentage points each. Moss, Ottawa Impact’s co-founder, easily defeated his primary opponent by 14 points.

But his movement, which in January 2023 controlled eight of the 11 board seats, had suffered a devastating blow. After Tuesday’s results, they would, at best, retain just four.

“Their majority is gone,” said a relieved Poehlman a little after midnight. Her preferred candidate lost to Moss, but she and her friends didn’t let the defeat dampen their late-night celebration.

“That’s awesome,” said Janet Martin, a Democrat sitting next to her.

“It’s good for our county,” added Judy Bergman, a former Republican.

A new era

The next morning the people of Ottawa County awoke and started trying to make sense of what had happened the previous night. Atwood didn’t see the results, which included her own loss, as proof that Republicans had grown weary of Ottawa Impact’s hard-line politics. Instead, she blamed Democrats who crossed over and voted in the Republican primary for her group’s defeat.

“My Republican election was taken from me by Democrats” and wealthy donors, Atwood said. “Not every best candidate wins. That’s just how it is.”

Moss vowed that despite the results, he would never moderate his message. “The majority does not dictate morality,” he said in a statement posted to Ottawa Impact’s website. “There are consequences to abandoning truth and abdicating freedom.”

Justin Roebuck, Ottawa County’s clerk and a self-described conservative Republican, had sought to remain neutral in his local party’s civil war. He defended the integrity of the voting system that he oversaw but tried to win over the skeptics and election deniers in his party with good humor and civility. On Wednesday evening he invited about 50 of the county’s Republican leaders to a “unity” party at a brewery in Holland, Ottawa County’s largest city.

The gathering brought together all flavors of Ottawa Republicans. Josh Brugger, who won the GOP primary for relatively moderate Grand Haven’s commission seat, described the previous night’s results as a “multi-partisan” victory over Trumpism.

“When radicalism reared up, we all united to put it back down,” he said. He stood only a few feet away from Moss, who was wearing a light-colored sports coat over a campaign T-shirt that bore his name, spelled out in all capital letters.

Roebuck, who had been up late overseeing the election returns, was working on three hours of sleep when he took the microphone and addressed the crowd.

“Frankly, this has been a challenging and contentious time,” he began. Roebuck never mentioned Trump. Instead, he invoked Ronald Reagan, whom he described as a “man of principle,” and urged his fellow Republicans to come together in November to fight for the values that they shared — limited government, personal responsibility, fiscal restraint.

“We do have a lot to fight for and there are clear, clear differences,” he said, referring to the upcoming presidential contest in his critical swing state and a competitive campaign for an open Senate seat. At the county level, Republicans hope to prevent Democrats from adding any more board seats to the two they currently hold.

Barry, who came dressed in a shirt that featured the Statue of Liberty, fireworks and busts of Frederick Douglass and the Founding Fathers, said he wanted to find a way to work with Moss and the three other Ottawa Impact Republicans on the county board.

“Nobody was conquered last night,” he said. “We all live here. We’re all neighbors.”

There were 148 days remaining until the new board members would be sworn in and a new era of Ottawa County politics would begin.

Tim Walz was in the thick of a crowded Democratic primary for governor of Minnesota in August 2017 when he appeared at a sports and outdoor show known as Minnesota’s “finest hunting event.”

As a congressman representing a rural swath of southern Minnesota, Walz had championed gun rights — earning an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association — and often proudly sported a camo hat featuring the affirmation “NRA ENDORSED.” But as he sought his party’s nomination in a state that had backed the Democratic presidential nominee since 1976, Walz was equivocal when asked about access to guns.

“He tried to find a middle ground, saying he was a strong advocate but also supported common sense regulation,” said Rob Doar, senior vice president of the nonprofit Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, a prominent gun rights group.

The moment showed how Walz went about moderating his stance on guns — slowly at first, and then seemingly all at once. Two months later, after a gunman left 60 dead at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Walz pledged to donate his previous NRA contributions to a charity for families of fallen service members. And a mere four months after that, as the nation reeled again from a mass killing, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Walz “went full-bore on gun control,” Doar said.

The shift, capped by his recent support as governor for a wave of significant gun-control bills in Minnesota, placed him squarely in line with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, which he’s now helping lead into November as the vice-presidential nominee. His evolution on guns, in a tight time frame punctuated by some of the most deadly recent shootings, illustrates the galvanizing effect of the mass-casualty events. But his change of heart also came at a time when gun-control groups began spending significantly more on candidates who shared their positions.

In his decade as a pro-gun congressman, Walz received donations totaling $18,950 from the NRA and $6,000 from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, campaign records show. After Parkland, as he prepared to go to battle with the NRA, which had earned a reputation as a grassroots juggernaut that could make or break a political career, he wrote on Facebook: “I expect them to start spending heavily to defeat me.”

Instead, that year marked a turning point, as gun-control groups outspent the NRA and other firearms organizations amid an outcry over gun violence. The political arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, the group founded by billionaire Mike Bloomberg, invested heavily in governor’s races, helping to elect Democrat Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and to defeat Republican Adam Laxalt in Nevada. And in the homestretch of the race in Minnesota, Everytown donated $200,000 to a pro-Walz political committee, according to campaign records.

“It’s no surprise he turned away from the NRA as the NRA turned more and more extreme,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “Governor Walz has proven that he’s not afraid to stand up to the gun lobby to keep his constituents safe.”

In the days since Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris picked Walz as her running mate, gun rights groups have sought to remind voters of what they cast as the governor’s betrayal.

“Tim Walz is a political chameleon — changing his positions to further his own personal agenda,” Randy Kozuch, chairman of the NRA Political Victory Fund, said in a statement. The U.S. Concealed Carry Association for Saving Lives sent out an alert to members featuring a video of Walz signing gun-control legislation that it said created “onerous barriers standing in between you and your ability to protect your family.”

A spokeswoman for the Harris-Walz campaign said, “After some of the worst mass shootings in our country’s history, the governor was moved to take a hard look at the facts and decided to support common sense gun reform that would prevent future tragedies. That level of introspection is something to be commended, not critiqued.”

A lifelong hunter and former National Guardsman, Walz was active in the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus when he served in the U.S. House from 2007 to 2018, and he led the group during part of his time on Capitol Hill. He backed a number of bills favored by gun enthusiasts and, in 2016, Guns & Ammo magazine named him one of the top 20 politicians for gun owners.

But there were signs that Walz was not as hard line as some of his more conservative colleagues. After the mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Walz indicated he might be open to a ban on high-capacity, military-style rifles.

“What people are putting forward, looking at assault magazines, assault weapons, that should be in the discussion,” he told a Minnesota paper. “It has to strike the proper balance between the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens versus the safety of all Americans.”

Five years later, as he campaigned for governor, he faced pressure from within his party to take a stronger position on guns. A Democratic primary opponent, Erin Murphy, made an issue of his “A” rating from the NRA and called on him to give back contributions from the pro-gun advocacy group, which he pledged to do after the carnage at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in October 2017.

“We came into that race with different positions and he evolved over time,” said Murphy, who’s now the Democratic majority leader of Minnesota’s state Senate. “And I understand why, rightfully, because of what we were seeing happening.”

After the Parkland shooting in Florida in February 2018, Walz proposed an assault weapons ban. At one campaign event, he said: “My job today is to be dad to a 17-year-old daughter named Hope,” explaining that after the violence, she “woke up like many of you did five weeks ago and said, ‘Dad, you’re the only person I know who’s in elected office. You need to stop what’s happening with this.’”

Walz added: “I’ll take my kick in the butt from the NRA.”

Walz’s shift also came as gun-control groups were gaining influence and the NRA was roiled by internal feuds and corruption allegations. Between 2016 and 2022, NRA revenue fell more than 40 percent, while membership dues were down roughly 50 percent, according to tax filings. Campaign spending dropped, and legal expenses soared. The NRA’s Political Victory Fund donated just $2,000 to Walz’s Republican opponent in the fall of 2018, records show.

Gun rights groups did not mobilize in a significant way against Walz when he ran for reelection in 2022, said his Republican opponent, then-state Sen. Scott Jensen, who had backed increasing penalties on “straw” buyers of firearms who resell them to ineligible gun owners.

“The gun groups weren’t falling in love with me either even though I was stronger [on gun rights] than Tim Walz,” said Jensen, who called Walz “a very adept politician.”

In 2023, as Democrats controlled both legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion for the first time in about a decade, Walz signed sweeping gun-control legislation that expanded background checks on gun buyers and created “red flag” protections to take guns away from people deemed a danger to themselves or others.

Murphy, his onetime primary opponent, said he has proved himself a reliable partner on gun violence prevention.

“The last two years in Minnesota, we’ve passed a number of pieces of legislation that he signed into law as a result of that necessary evolution,” she said.

In late July, as Harris was nearing a decision on her running mate, Walz bragged in a social media post about getting “straight Fs” from the NRA in recent years. “And I sleep just fine,” he added.

Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris is echoing an idea first proposed by her opponent, Donald Trump, by pledging that she would push to eliminate taxes on tips.

“When I am president, we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” Harris said during a campaign rally Saturday at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

It was the last stop for Harris and her running mate on the Democratic ticket, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as they toured swing states, including Nevada, where the service industry is a major employer. Leisure and hospitality is the main industry in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, accounting for over a quarter of total employment in January 2023, according to the Nevada Office of Workforce Innovation.

Many service workers were enthusiastic when Trump made a similar proposal at a rally in the same city two months ago. “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy. Because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips,” Trump said.

After Harris’s announcement, Trump said in a post on his social media platform that Harris “copied my NO TAXES ON TIPS Policy,” adding that “This was a TRUMP idea – She has no ideas, she can only steal from me.”

The idea of scrapping taxes on tips for some workers is not new, and unions representing service and hospitality workers have been pushing for it for years. Still, some of those unions expressed skepticism that Trump would be able to implement the idea when he proposed it. Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer for Culinary Workers Union Local 226 — which endorsed Harris and Walz ahead of Saturday’s event — previously said the Culinary Union has “fought for tipped workers’ rights and against unfair taxation” for decades.

“Relief is definitely needed for tip earners, but Nevada workers are smart enough to know the difference between real solutions and wild campaign promises from a convicted felon,” Pappageorge said in a statement, referring to Trump’s New York conviction this year on charges related to a hush money payment.

The hospitality workers union Unite Here, which also endorsed Harris, likewise downplayed Trump’s pledge. Union President Gwen Mills told the Associated Press that Trump was “making a play” for votes.

As The Washington Post has reported, under current law, all gratuities that workers receive must be taxed at the same rate as their regular income, and many employers report their workers’ tips to the Internal Revenue Service — but much is paid in cash and never reported. More than 6 million workers had tips reported to the IRS in 2018, the most recent year for which complete data is available.

Tips are crucial for many hospitality and service workers. The federal government and many states allow employers to pay tipped workers well below the normal minimum wage, provided they make up the difference to ensure each worker earns at least the standard federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. When President Joe Biden was still running for reelection, he called for eliminating the lower tipped minimum wage and increasing the minimum wage for all workers.

Any change to the taxation of tipped income would require an act of Congress — where there appears to be some bipartisan support for the idea. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) introduced legislation in June called the No Tax on Tips Act, which would exempt tips from federal income tax. The proposal received the backing of Nevada’s two Democratic senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto.

The Budget Lab, a nonpartisan policy research center affiliated with Yale University, analyzed the bill and concluded it would not have a large impact on the U.S. workforce. It said “a meaningful share” of tipped workers — representing less than 3 percent of all employment in the United States — already pay no federal income tax because they earn less than federal minimums.

“This suggests that the direct effect of the bill on the workforce as it stands today—before accounting for behavioral changes—would be small,” the Budget Lab analysis said. “The larger and far more uncertain effect would stem from behavioral changes incentivized by the bill, such as substitution into tipped employment and tipped income, which would increase the bill’s overall cost.”

The presidential candidates’ proposals were not heavy on details.

When asked for more information at the time, a Trump spokeswoman said: “President Trump will ask Congress to eliminate taxes on tips.”

On Saturday, a Harris campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, made clear that her proposal “would require legislation” and that it would not be a free-for-all.

“As President, she would work with Congress to craft a proposal that comes with an income limit and with strict requirements to prevent hedge fund managers and lawyers from structuring their compensation in ways to try to take advantage of the policy,” the official said.

Julie Zauzmer Weil contributed to this report.

Analysts and intelligence experts warned Sunday that wider efforts may be underway by foreign powers to disrupt the U.S. presidential election, after the Trump campaign said it believed its email systems had been breached by hackers working for Iran.

So far, two Democratic House members who have served on intelligence and security committees have called for briefings and for declassification of information related to the possible foreign interference in the election.

“Buckle up,” Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency posted on X, referring back to the 2016 campaign, when U.S. intelligence concluded that Russia interfered in the election by hacking and leaking internal Democratic documents. “Someone is running the 2016 playbook, expect continued efforts to stoke fires in society and go after election systems — 95% votes on paper ballots is a strong resilience measure, combined with audits. But the chaos is the point.”

The Trump campaign announcement came after it received questions from news organizations about an internal vetting document on vice-presidential candidate JD Vance that had been sent to the outlets.

The Washington Post was sent on Thursday the 271-page document, marked as “privileged & confidential,” from an anonymous AOL user going by the name “Robert.” Politico, which was the first to report on the Trump campaign’s statement, said that it had been receiving documents, including a vetting document on Vance, from a sender also going by the name “Robert” since July 22.

The Trump campaign has pointed to a report released Friday by Microsoft in which the company said it had discovered evidence that Iranian hackers had tried to break into the email account of a “high-ranking official” on a U.S. presidential campaign in June, which was around the same time Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate.

The company has declined to name the campaign but a person familiar with Microsoft’s work confirmed that the report’s reference was to the Trump campaign.

U.S. officials have not confirmed the campaign was hacked, and the campaign did not provide evidence of the breach or Iranian involvement.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee’s cybersecurity subcommittee, said that he was seeking a briefing from the Department of Homeland Security.

“Yes, Trump is the most despicable person ever to seek office. He also sought foreign hacking in a past election. But that doesn’t mean America ever tolerates foreign interference,” he posted on X.

Former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) urged officials to quickly declassify any information on the possible foreign nature of the hack reported by the campaign.

“In 2016, the Intelligence Community moved much too slow to properly identity the hacking and dumping scheme carried out by Russia to divide Americans and benefit the Trump campaign,” he posted on X. “The IC has since made improvements, but should act quickly here.”

He also called on both parties to condemn the reported hack. “In 2016, the Trump campaign welcomed Russian interference, took advantage of it, and then sought to deny it, much to the detriment of the country,” he said.

The Harris-Walz campaign has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Since 2016, Democratic campaigns and affiliated organizations have put an emphasis on enhanced security protocols and heavily invested to shore up systems to guard against hacks and other cybersecurity threats.

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, said on his social media platform Truth Social that his campaign was informed by Microsoft that one of their websites was hacked by the Iranian government. He also claimed that only publicly available information was taken.

“We were just informed by Microsoft Corporation that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!” he posted on the platform late on Saturday.

“They were only able to get publicly available information but, nevertheless, they shouldn’t be doing anything of this nature. Iran and others will stop at nothing, because our Government is Weak and Ineffective, but it won’t be for long.”

The document that was sent to The Post was an internal campaign write-up of Vance’s potential political vulnerabilities, dated Feb. 23, that had been commissioned by the campaign from the law firm Brand Woodward. While it drew from public records and news clips, the vetting report itself was an internal document not previously public.

On Saturday, a spokesperson for the National Security Council said the Biden administration “strongly condemns any foreign government or entity who attempts to interfere in our electoral process or seeks to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”

The FBI said in a statement on Saturday that the agency was aware of the media reports and had no comment.

Josh Dawsey, Isaac Arnsdorf, Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager contributed to this report.

Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed on social media Sunday that a crowd at a Michigan rally for Vice President Kamala Harris last week “DIDN’T EXIST,” “nobody was there” and that photos of the event were fabricated by artificial intelligence.

In the days following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would step aside as the Democratic nominee, conspiracy theorists and far-right influencers have promoted a number of falsehoods targeted at the Harris campaign. But Trump’s repeating of the false claims about the crowd size and photos, with multiple posts on his Truth Social platform, is a notable escalation.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” the Republican nominee for president wrote on social media. Trump continued, “She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.”

There were in fact thousands of people gathered when the plane arrived at the airport, and there is no evidence that news organizations altered photos using artificial intelligence. There is also no evidence that Harris, or Democrats more broadly, have cheated to win elections, despite Trump’s repeated false allegations that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.”

David Plouffe, a senior adviser for Kamala Harris for President, expressed concern on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, about Trump’s comments.

“These are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet,” Plouffe wrote. “The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades.”

The event last week at an airport hangar in Detroit was live-streamed, widely attended by the media including The Washington Post, and many attendees posted their own pictures and video showing a packed venue. Local news outlet MLive estimated that 15,000 people filled the hangar and that attendees spilled out into the tarmac.

Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state legislator who was at the event tweeted photos, noting that “you can just see the throngs of people outside.”

On Sunday, the Harris campaign rejected Trump’s comments, writing on the social media site X, “This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan.”

Trump, the GOP nominee for president, for years has been focused on crowd size as a metric of success. He has repeatedly taken to social media to boast about how the size of crowd he could draw and last week asserted at a news conference that “nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.”

Trump has previously claimed that the audience for a speech he gave in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, eclipsed the numbers who attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech despite photographic evidence that it did not.

Trump has regularly been challenged by fact-checkers and opposition groups for elevating discredited allegations, repeating unfounded rumors as fact, or grabbing onto conspiracies, especially when under political threat.

In 2016, he falsely claimed President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and did not attend Columbia University, that Trump’s taxes were audited because he is Christian, that vaccines are connected to autism and that climate change is a hoax.

In 2020, he refused to advocate for wearing masks during the coronavirus pandemic, and promoted unfounded claims about purported risks.

The Washington Post Fact Checker team in January 2021 noted that it had logged “30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.”

Trump’s focus on crowd size also has become something that the Harris campaign has used to poke fun at Trump about — while at the same time bragging about their own crowds.

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz at a Friday night rally with Harris, looking at an audience in Arizona that Democrats estimated at more than 15,000, quipped, “It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything.”

On Sunday afternoon, the Harris campaign released a statement describing a crowd of “more than 12,000 Nevadans” at a rally over the weekend — “one of the largest political rallies in modern Nevada political history” — and then described previous audiences as including “14,000+ in Philadelphia, 12,000+ in Eau Claire, and 15,000+ in both Detroit and Arizona.”

And at a fundraising event in San Francisco on Sunday, Harris appeared to address Trump’s social media accusations indirectly.

The energy around the country is “undeniable,” Harris said, adding, “The press and our opponents like to focus on our crowd size, and yes the crowds are large.” But even better, she said, attendees are signing up for volunteer shifts by the thousands.