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Trump Attacks News Media Over Reporting on Crowd Size With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift
(about 1 hour later)
WASHINGTON — President Trump and his staff spent their first full day in the White House waging a bitter war against the news media over depictions of the crowd at the inauguration on Friday. WASHINGTON — President Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.
In a pair of angry public appearances on Saturday, Mr. Trump and his White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, excoriated the news media for what they said were deliberate efforts to understate the number of people who had gathered on the National Mall. In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency designed to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago. He called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved.
He claimed that Mr. Trump had drawn “the largest inaugural crowd ever,” but quickly acknowledged that there were “no numbers” to confirm it, noting that the Park Service does not issue crowd estimates. Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where he delivered an irate scolding to reporters and made a series of false statements. Mr. Spicer said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.
The Park Service said in 2009 that it “firmly” believed that Barack Obama had drawn the largest crowd ever to the National Mall. Photographs of Mr. Obama’s first inauguration and of Mr. Trump’s clearly showed that the crowd on Friday was significantly smaller. The statements from the new president and his spokesman were a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency, usually a time when the White House works to set a tone of national unity and build confidence in a new leader. Instead, Mr. Trump and his team appeared embattled and defensive, signaling that the pugnacious style the president employed as a candidate will persist now that he has ascended to the nation’s highest office.
Earlier on Saturday at an appearance at the C.I.A. headquarters, Mr. Trump said the news media had created a misleading impression about his inauguration crowd. Saturday was supposed to be a day for Mr. Trump to mend fences with an intelligence community he had publicly scorned, with an appearance at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va. While he was lavish in his praise, the president focused in his 15-minute speech on his complaints about news coverage of his criticism of the nation’s spy agencies, and meandered to other topics, including the crowd size at his inauguration, his level of political support, his mental age and his intellectual heft.
“We had a massive field of people — you saw that,” he said. “I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I said, ‘Wait a minute, I made a speech, I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people.’ They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there and they said, ‘Donald Trump did not draw well.’” “I just want to let you know, I am so behind you,” Mr. Trump told more than 300 employees assembled in the lobby for his remarks.
Mr. Spicer started his first White House briefing by accusing news outlets of intentionally manipulating photographs “to minimize the enormous support” that Mr. Trump had received. He suggested that the news media wanted to compare the turnout on Friday unfavorably with the huge anti-Trump protest in Washington on Saturday. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has upbraided the intelligence community for leaks and questioned its conclusion that Russia meddled in the United States election on his behalf. On Saturday, he said journalists were responsible for any suggestion that he was not fully supportive of intelligence agencies’ work.
He then launched into a detailed technical discussion of inaugural crowd-counting, attributing clearly visible gaps in the crowd to white “coverings” meant to protect the grass. He also said that security measures had prevented “hundreds of thousands” of people from entering the Mall. “I have a running war with the media,” Mr. Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”
He claimed that Mr. Trump’s inaugural was the first one for which white plastic sheets were used, highlighting the empty spaces. In fact, they were used at Mr. Obama’s 2013 inauguration as well, according to images taken that day by news outlets. “The reason you’re the No. 1 stop is, it is exactly the opposite,” Mr. Trump added. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.”
And he incorrectly claimed that ridership on Washington’s subway system was higher than on Inauguration Day in 2013. In reality, there were 782,000 riders that year, compared to 571,000 riders this year, according to a study by The Washington Post. Mr. Trump also took issue with news reports about the number of people who attended his inauguration, complaining that the news media used photographs of “an empty field” to make it seem as if his inauguration did not draw many people.
“We are going to hold the press accountable,” Mr. Spicer shouted before leaving without answering reporters’ questions. “We caught them in a beauty,” Mr. Trump said of the news media, “and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s first press secretary, who watched Mr. Spicer’s broadside on television, wrote on Twitter: “This is called a statement you are told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching.” Mr. Spicer said that Mr. Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” a statement that photographs clearly show to be false. Mr. Spicer said photographs of the inaugural ceremonies were deliberately framed “to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” although he provided no proof of either assertion.
The issue of crowd size, so important to a president obsessed with image and branding, completely overshadowed Mr. Trump’s messages of economic resurgence and a new war on the “carnage” he believes to be taking place in America’s cities. Photographs of Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 and of Mr. Trump’s plainly showed that the crowd on Friday was significantly smaller, but Mr. Spicer attributed that disparity to new white ground coverings he said had caused empty areas to stand out and to security measures that had blocked people from entering the Mall.
A photographic analysis of an image taken 45 minutes before Mr. Trump took the oath of office and an image taken at the same time eight years earlier during Mr. Obama’s ceremony showed far fewer attendees for Mr. Trump’s event. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Mr. Spicer said. He also admonished a journalist for erroneously reporting on Friday that Mr. Trump had removed a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office, calling the mistake — which was corrected quickly — “egregious.”
The analysis, by Keith Still, a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University in Britain, an expert on crowd estimates, said he believed that Mr. Trump’s crowd was about one-third the size of Mr. Obama’s. And he incorrectly claimed that ridership on Washington’s subway system was higher than on Inauguration Day in 2013. In reality, there were 782,000 riders that year, compared with 571,000 riders this year, according to a study by The Washington Post.
In Mr. Trump’s remarks at the C.I.A., he wandered off topic several times, at various points telling the crowd he felt no older than 39 (he is 70); reassuring anyone who questioned his intelligence by saying, “I’m, like, a smart person”; and musing out loud about how many intelligence workers backed his candidacy.
“Probably everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re all on the same wavelength, folks.”
The remarks touched off a fierce reaction from some current and former intelligence officials.
Nick Shapiro, who served as chief of staff to John O. Brennan, who resigned Friday as the C.I.A. director, said Mr. Brennan “is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of C.I.A.’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes.
“Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself,” Mr. Shapiro added.
“I was heartened that the president gave a speech at C.I.A.,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. “It would have been even better if more of it had been about C.I.A.”
Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that he had had high hopes for Mr. Trump’s visit as a step to begin healing the relationship between the president and the intelligence community, but that Mr. Trump’s meandering speech had dashed them.
“While standing in front of the stars representing C.I.A. personnel who lost their lives in the service of their country — hallowed ground — Trump gave little more than a perfunctory acknowledgment of their service and sacrifice,” Mr. Schiff said. “He will need to do more than use the agency memorial as a backdrop if he wants to earn the respect of the men and women who provide the best intelligence in the world.”
Mr. Trump said nothing during the visit about how he had mocked the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies as “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” He did not mention his apparent willingness to believe Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who is widely detested at the C.I.A., over his own intelligence agencies.
He also did not say whether he would start receiving the daily intelligence briefs that are prepared for the president. The agency sees the president as its main audience, and his dismissal of the need for daily briefings from the intelligence community has raised concerns about morale among people who believe their work will not be respected at the Trump White House.
At the C.I.A., Trump did not encounter any outright hostility — the agency prides itself as being the eyes and ears of the president around the world — and he will certainly find supporters among its ranks. The nomination of Mike Pompeo, a former Army infantry officer who is well versed in issues facing the intelligence community, to lead the C.I.A. has also been received positively at the agency, where many took it as a signal that Mr. Trump was ready to start taking the work done by the C.I.A. seriously.
But in the months since the election, hopes at the C.I.A. that the new administration would bring an infusion of energy and ideas have given way to trepidation about what Mr. Trump and his loyalists have planned.
“He has left the strong impression that he doesn’t trust the intelligence community and that he doesn’t have tremendous regard for their work,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a retired C.I.A. analyst. “The obvious thing to do is to counter that by saying, ‘I value you, I look forward to working with you.’”
“He called them Nazis,” Mr. Lowenthal added, referring to Mr. Trump’s characterization of the intelligence community. Mr. Lowenthal said Saturday’s visit should have been “a stroking expedition.”