These guys are actors, it appears. Is this par for the course for such events, and Trump unfairly maligned for it? Or is it The Donald in action?
Trump is controversial and well-known and thus it just makes sense that you'd assume he'd draw a big crowd. But it immediately made me think of last year's CPAC, when Trump spoke to a practically empty room:
The thing about Trump is that he's not even a good troll. We often ignore the fact that most voters—including people who share his views—are viscerally disgusted by him. I suspect I like to talk about him more than you like to hear about him, which is another way of saying that coverage of Trump is a form of media navel-gazing. He's a prop in our narratives about American political life. What we say about him is often a judgment on our relationship to it.