A video showing dozens of empty seats at the back of Donald Trump‘s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday has gone viral after being shared online.
The nine-second clip uploaded to Twitter by NBC national correspondent Gabe Gutierrez panned around the Erie Insurance Arena and revealed a number of empty seats towards the back of the venue as Trump spoke to an enthusiastic crowd.
Gutierrez captioned the video: “Wider view of the Trump rally in Erie.”
Trump spoke to supporters amid mounting pressure from the Department of Justice after it filed court documents on Thursday that stated he would face additional charges over the investigation into classified papers kept at his Florida estate. The former president said he believed he was “being indicted for you [the crowd].”
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His comments were met with applause and cheers by an overwhelming majority of people in the crowd.
According to the Erie Insurance Arena, the venue has more than 9,000 seats and hosts the Ontario Hockey League team, the Erie Otters, as well as concerts and other community events. The official attendance has not yet been made public.
Since being shared on July 29, the video has been viewed around 790,000 times and had received 3,475 likes at the time of writing.
The Department of Justice said in court documents filed on Thursday that Trump would face additional federal charges over the classified papers found at his Florida Mar-a-Lago residence.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 37 charges, including 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information.
The indictments against the former president have not dented his favorability among his supporters, with rally attendees praising his apparent “Christian values,” and some also referring to him as a king ahead of the campaign stop.
In one video, a rallygoer seen wearing a shirt that read “The Great MAGA King,” praised Trump as a monarch.
“We’ve got to support the king,” she said, adding that “King Trump” comes only after “King Jesus.”
Trump comfortably leads the GOP nomination race with a total larger than all other challengers combined.
According to the national polling average collected by poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, as of July 27, Trump leads with 52.4 percent of the vote and his closest challenger Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stands at 15.5 percent.
Despite leading the GOP nomination race, an average rating collected by the polling site found that 56.6 percent disapproved of the former president as of July 27.
In comparison, President Joe Biden held a disapproval rating of 54.2 percent and an approval rating of 40.9 percent as of July 29. The data is an aggregate of surveys of thousands of American adults taken since January1.
Pennsylvania, a critical swing state in the 2024 presidential election, voted for the then-Democrat candidate Biden in 2020 and for Trump in 2016.
Newsweek contacted the Trump campaign for comment via email on Thursday.