NBC Correspondent Walks Through the Crowd Live at Trump Rally to Show Large Blocks of Empty Seats

NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard was at the scene on Monday for one of former President Donald Trump’s final rallies. And after covering Trump’s rallies for nearly a decade, he noticed a big change in the size of Trump’s rally crowds.

Trump was scheduled to take the stage in Raleigh, North Carolina at 10:00 am on Monday, but when Hillyard did a live hit on MSNBC a few minutes after the hour, the candidate wasn’t there. So instead, he took viewers on a brief tour of the venue and reported on something new he was seeing:

I want to show you guys real fast what this crowd looks like, because Donald Trump is scheduled to take the stage at 10 a.m.. And our Tony Butler is going to show you what this crowd currently looks like. We’re looking at about a capacity, about 70 percent full here. And for nine years — I’m going have Tony pan to the right — for nine years, we have talked about the enthusiasm and the masses that have come out for Trump’s rallies time and again, even at his politically lowest points, including in 2022.

But interestingly, and I can’t tell you exactly why, but in this final week, we have seen far smaller crowds. We were in Greensboro, North Carolina, where just a few thousand people, Macon, Georgia, just a few thousand people yesterday. What does that mean? Ultimately, you can only discern so much from what crowd sizes look like. But interestingly, for the first time since I’ve been covering Donald Trump since 2015, there’s been us in the press that have been looking around questioning why the crowd sizes have been less than what we are accustomed to.

Watch the video above via MSNBC.