National News Media Must Call Out Trump’s Lies
The unhinged fabrication that Donald Dinky Hands and his bootlicker mouthpiece Sean Spicer spouted on the Trump Regime’s first full day in office, preposterously claiming that his inaugural crowd was bigger than any before, would be laughable if it weren’t such chillingly clear evidence of the 46% 45th president’s Big Lie strategy.
It’s easy to make it a joke. Size matters. Ha, ha. But it’s not funny. It’s deadly serious.
Herr Trump showed that on something as photographically and measurably obvious as the size of the meager crowd he attracted to celebrate his inauguration, compared not only to the multitudes that feted Barack Obama but also to Saturday’s D.C. Women’s March protesting his vile politics, he is unable to accept any reality in which he is diminished.
“This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer — surely under orders from the boss — told the White House press corps on Saturday. “Both in person and around the globe.”
He accused the news media of “deliberately false reporting,” not just with crowd estimates but with its photos as well.
Are you gonna’ believe me or your lying eyes? Spicer, in a yelling, madman performance in the White House press room, said 420,000 people had used the D.C. metro on Trump’s inauguration day, compared to 317,000 for Obama’s 2013 inauguration.
But, according to the Washington Post, Metro said 570,557 people took trips on Friday in total, compared with 1.1 million trips at Obama’s 2009 inauguration and 782,000 at his 2013 inauguration.
Here’s one Twitter post from Metro itself: Metro Ridership: As of 11am, 193k trips taken so far today. (11am 1/20/13 = 317k, 11am 1/20/09 = 513k, 11am 1/20/05 = 197k) #wmata
Trump harangued officers assembled at the CIA with a totally inappropriate and fantasy declaration that his inaugural crowd was about 1.5 million, compared to most estimates that topped out at 250,000.
Complaining about one TV report, Trump said, “It showed an empty field. And it said we drew 250,000 people. Now that’s not bad. But it’s a lie.
“We had 250,000 people literally around, you know, in the little bowl we constructed. That was 250,000 people. The rest of the 20-block area all the way back to the Washington Monument, that was packed.”
But live television shots, videos along the parade route and other photographic records proving this was a lie were easier to read than any evidence the intelligence analysts he was addressing might use to target ISIS encampments.
Help us Obi Wan Kanobi. You’re our only hope. The national news media – especially the network and cable White House press corps – must not laugh this off.
We are relying on them to make a HUGE deal of it because it was a first-day-in-prison test: Will Trump and his press secretary get away with standing up and lying through their teeth, denying what is happening in the real world, without urgent pushback from the Fourth Estate?
Push back now or get rolled and bitch slapped for the next four years.
And that’s not the worst of it. Trump’s CIA visit, which was expected to be a kiss-and-make-up session for intelligence agents he in recent weeks called “Nazis” and mocked for erroneous recommendations and information gathering about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; instead it was a debacle, not only because of his lies about his crowds, but also due to a rant that blamed the media — “the most dishonest people on earth” — for his recent attacks on the Agency. He couldn’t even resist delivering a whopper about the inauguration day weather, as the WashPost, to its credit, did not let pass.
Trump also misrepresented what happened to the weather during his swearing in. He said he felt a few drops of rain as he started delivering his address, but then, “God looked down and, and he said we’re not going to let it rain on your speech.. . .The truth is it stopped immediately.”
Light rain continued to fall through the first few minutes of the speech — and VIP’s at the dais took out ponchos, including former president George W. Bush — and then quit. Trump said there was a downpour right after he finished, which did not occur.
Brennan steps up. Trump’s rambling diatribe was so egregious that John Brennan, a CIA lifer, and its just-resigned director, called it “despicable,” speaking through a former top aide.
“Former CIA Director Brennan is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of CIA’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes,” Brennan said via former CIA deputy chief of staff Nick Shapiro. “Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself.”
Both the Post and the NYT deserve credit for soberly calling out Trump on some of his lies. (He even lied about how many times he’d been on the cover of Time magazine, a subject that only a brazen narcissist could bring up in remarks to the CIA.)
“With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift,” the Times headlined its story. The Post reported Trump’s statements straight but followed each falsehood with a sentence or graf pointing out his untruths.
But it’s not enough.
Even if the national papers used stronger disclaimers, which they should, the fact remains that newspapers increasingly are read by well-educated elites who already oppose Trump. The networks and cable outlets (excepting of course the lickspittle “reporting” on Fox delivered by Trump pal Rupert Murdoch) must refuse to be intimidated and hammer away in tough, direct and uncompromising language that refuses to normalize what clearly is unbalanced person and a dangerous tyrant.
It also wouldn’t hurt to point out that he’s clinically mentally ill.
KKKelly Ann Conway clarified it this morning with Matt Lauer.
She said that Spicer did not lie or exaggerate when he said that “Trump’s was larger than Obama’s…in fact, it was the largest ever. Period!”
KKKelly Ann suggested that they were “alternate facts.”
So we can now officially add “alt-facts” to our lexicon along with “alt-right.”
p.s. I prefer the sobriquet President Cheeto and to save time in my two-finger typing, I simply refer to Trumps tweets as ‘twumps,’ although now that I’m looking at it on my screen, ‘cheets’ might be more appropriate than ‘twumps.’
Do you have any thoughts on it, Jerry?
I’ll have to think about it.
Trump figured out early in the campaign that it serves him well to control the headlines even if the headlines are negative. If he has a choice between “Trump and Spicer lie through their teeth” and “5 million march against Trump”, he would easily want the first headline. When given the choice of outrageous and consequential, the media chooses outrageous every time.