Does a picture posted by Roger Stone, a political consultant for former President Donald Trump, show a massive crowd for a New Jersey 2024 presidential campaign event for Trump? No, that's not true: The image is of people waiting for a concert to start, not participants in a Trump rally. The show was held by The Rolling Stones in 2006 in Brazil.
The claim was implied in a post on X on Stone's official account on May 12, 2024. The post included an image of a large crowd on a beach and was captioned:
Yeah, New Jersey is in play for @realDonaldTrump. Could Joe Biden draw a crowd like this?
This is what the post looked like on X, formerly Twitter, at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon May 13 15:48:23 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories performed a Bing reverse image search and found an image similar (archived here) to the one in the post on X. Using Google, we performed another reverse image search of the similar image. The search led us to a Getty Images page featuring photos related to a concert by The Rolling Stones (archived here). A few images show the stage and sweeping crowd, as seen here (archived here) and here (archived here). Other images in the series (here and here) show the construction of and sponsorships depicted on the stage, indicating that even though the picture included in the post on X is not an exact match, it is from the same event.
The Rolling Stones concert (archived here) was held on February 18, 2006, on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. An estimated 1.5 million people attended the free show.
In a follow-up X thread published on May 13, 2024, Stone appeared to signal that the post with the picture was a joke. However, he did not make the origin of the image clear.
Other Lead Stories fact checks related to Donald Trump can be found here.
