His visits to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Princeton and New York exposed him to a diversity of opinion makers but, put together, the audiences were no more than 5,000 people. While the numbers do not necessarily tell the whole story, what they do say was that the attendees were mainly props to transmit a more credible message back home, where his voice is either instantly derided by a frenzied social media trolling culture, or ignored altogether.