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Tempest in a Mall? Not really
“Why care about the crowd size on the Mall for an inauguration, and whether Trump’s was the biggest ever? Why make Sean Spicer’s press conference about it a big story?” Good question. Here’s my answer.
I’m one who agrees in not caring about the issue on a first approach. Does the size of an inaugural crowd has any relation to how well a President will govern? Not that I can see. What’s more, Friday’s event drew a very big audience both in person and in domestic viewership, more than respectable, even if not as big as Reagan I and Obama I. Trump could reasonably point out that more of his strongest followers live far from DC and may not have means to travel for a Friday midday event. TV viewership ratings become ever less certain with Internet viewing, especially the large audience outside the US. In short, I don’t think the White House would have gotten in trouble with fair-minded observers had it simply used the facts, rather than, as they soon became infamously known, “alternative facts.”
So why’d the story blow up?
1) Trump himself cares greatly about this issue, enough to spend a lot of energy on it. That tells us something about him. Some report him as thinking the dispute implicates his very legitimacy, and some of his supporters online have woven theories of deliberate press misconduct, such as misrepresenting when aerial photos were taken, although photos with times noted or taken in sequence, such as those posted by PBS, appear to confirm that the Friday crowd fell well short of that drawn by Obama in 2009.
2) Many of us who didn’t care to begin with have been drawn into the issue by the White House’s willingness to assert untruths so confidently about it. It’s an issue on which several types of evidence (photographic, eyewitness accounts from experienced crowd estimators, Washington subway usage, and, on the claims about remote viewership, published broadcast ratings) could immediately be brought to bear to show the White House was playing fast and loose with the truth.
3) Every White House lies on at least some issues involving state secrets, national security, and foreign relations. Most also lie or shade the truth about some other high-stakes controversies (“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”) But why lie on *this* issue?
4) In telling lies, it is normal human behavior to tell ones that skirt falsification rather than ones that contradict what listeners just heard or saw with their own eyes. Even children learn this difference from an early age. One hopes it never becomes a test of loyalty to a government to accept lies at all, but especially not the second kind of lie. If it does, loyalty is being stretched rather far.
5) The timing matters. Many observers have taken a wait-and-see, give-him-a-chance approach on Trump because it is common for candidates to lie (or slime their opponents, or behave badly in other ways) during campaigns and then curb this misbehavior once they are in office. A breezy and entire disregard for factual accuracy was one of the biggest, if not the single biggest, problem with Trump as a campaigner. So for those who were waiting and seeing, one of the biggest open questions was whether he’d knock it off with the untruths once in office.
A follow-up press conference by Spicer got far better reviews for candor and plausibility. So let’s hope the first impression isn’t going to be the one to set the tone.
Published in Politics
A self-inflicted wound…minor, but real. Stuff like this better stop happening. How damn hard would it have been to say, “Look, anyone who read the election results knows that the Washington area didn’t vote for the president, and given our plans for the bureaucracy, who could be surprised at that? But hundreds of thousands of people joined in the celebration anyway, and we hear the TV and streaming audience was the biggest in 35 years”.
(follow up question, follow up question)
Answer: “Did you see our rallies last summer? Did anyone else’s compare?”
Now, was that so hard?
Actually Trump and the administration missed out on making a point. Of course the Democrats will have more participation at a Washington D.C. event. Their support stems from the entrenched bureaucracy and live in the vicinity. Trumps support comes from middle America and therefore would have had to leave work and travel half the country to attend.
Yes. Exactly. I wrote my comment before I read yours.
The underlying issue is important, which is why Trump spent time and political capital fighting it. The Left wants to say that the election is a fraud because Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. (Now, we all know that once you take out NYC and LA, Trump wins, and we also know that Hillary outperformed Obama in California in a way that provided almost all of her margin of popular-vote victory).
Trump likely saw how similar allegations (with a narrower popular vote spread) hurt George W. Bush during his first term.
I get fighting the issue, but it would have been far better to fight it the way @garymcvey suggested above: by focusing on how “crowd size” isn’t the final determinant of popularity. Hey, all those rural, left-behind voters in Wisconsin and Michigan would find it onerous and expensive to travel to DC. The left dominates in cities, so it’s just easier for them to get big crowds.
It wasn’t a self-inflicted wound at all. He put it out there, the media gulped it down despite the funny smell, they they got to vent their outrage and umbrage at the new administration. Trump and Spicer think, well they got that off their chest. Every appearance and utterance from Spicer since then has been solid. So the mainstream press got their pound of flesh and from now on they get pounded. Spicer is showing some brilliant chops. Perfect approach, I think.
This is more of the multi-dimensional chess master nonsense. Trump has great media savvy, but this was a mistake. Spicer coming out and denouncing the press for the MLK bust issue went well, the under reporting of the Inauguration crowd issue could have been handled much better.
Since Obama was the first black President, and since DC has a majority black population who didn’t have to go to far to witness history…. I doubt anyone could beat the numbers at the 2009 inaugural. So no one should have even expected this time to be larger than 2009. That’s what so odd about the whole thing.
The MSM usually make it a point to report:
– the truth
But they have serious problems with
– nothing but the truth … They are forever inserting their biased opinion
and especially problematic is
– the whole truth
So the ‘alternate fact’ flap is NOT a mis-step but rather a useful term for ‘the whole truth” … That is the other facts that shed light on the issue at hand that the MSM have not seen fit to report. In this case the ‘alternate facts’ include the details of the TV and online audience.
This particular fight was not handled especially well… However it is a fight worth having. You cannot let the MSM have an inch. Not one. It has to be driven home early and often that they will get called out on EVERY spun story … Every one. Large and small.
Maybe, Z. It’s not necessarily multi-dimensional but simply chess, as opposed to most other people’s checkers. I do think it affected the underlying dynamic between the press and the administration. We’ll see! In any case, there was no substance to the kerfuffle, and it will be forgotten very quickly because of the tsunami of action emanating from POTUS.
Perfect! Great idea splitting it up into truth’s constituent parts. HDAHA
On the chess/checkers subject: may I point out the end result of all this? In the last two days, Trump has ended TPP, reinstated the Mexico City policy, instituted a federal hiring and pay freeze, and is moving forward with the Keystone and Dakota pipelines.
Meanwhile, the left is in a froth about crowd numbers. They look either impotent (for fighting that when President Trump is moving forward on real issues) or like they are hopping from problem to problem, with no time to contemplate what they are doing or even offer a thoughtful rebuttal, like squirrels on cocaine.
Trump would have signed those orders with or without Spicer as his press secretary. Things going great? Things go even greater when you don’t foul up.
I agree this not consequential and will be forgotten soon if this kind of screwup isn’t repeated.
So then the question is this: why doesn’t the administration get this?
And don’t forget photos of the sea of idiots wearing pink “pussy hats” on their heads. These lying jerks have covered for 8 years for a lying, bowing, anti-American jerk who golfed 350 times on the public nickle. I hope Trump and Spicer keep hitting them in the teeth with a baseball bat till they spit teeth for weeks.
It’s John Paul Jones time, folks. The gloves are off. By the way, the nation seems to approve:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trump_administration/prez_track_jan24
Somebody ought to remind those floundering Democrats
“Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action.”
Does anybody really think this continual kabuki dance is an error?
Running against the media and loony leftist tomfoolery is a winning strategy. I remember talking about Trump’s Br’er Rabbit strategy during the long election campaign.
Are the Democrats, their spokesmen, and enablers making friends and winning voters from western NJ to eastern California, from the Canadian border to the Mexican border states?
The left and many NeverTrumpers are sure they know better and sure they are intellectually and morally superior to the Trumpster. But somehow he got to be 45 at a bargain basement price while his “betters” threw close to $2 billion out the window trying to stop him.
If Trump, Conway, and Spicer can neutralize the media, by calling them out, distracting them, and make them waste their energy, the left who are not media will continue to run around like chix with their heads chopped off.
The left is nothing, zero, zilch, nada, without the shield and podium that the media has provided for the past 8 years, and even longer.
Now we know the answer to that one. And we know Trump’s thin-skinned acting-out is going to continue. I see no reason to think there will be a change. Is there anyone with enough influence with him to make him stop filling his feet with lead?
There’s so much good he can do, but I can’t defend his behavior. Between his nonsense and the left’s insanity, I’m exhausted already. I can’t imagine four years of this.
They didn’t think of it, I guess. Or Trump is a stubborn S-O-B.
We had a good idea of what Trump was going into this. For me, it takes some of the pressure off. If another republican candidate won I would be more concerned about these things because I would have a higher opinion of his character, at least when it comes to manners and control of his tongue. I would want that reaffirmed. With Trump, I expect a bunch of outrageous statements and just hope he does some good. It’s easier to watch as a detached observer and just hope for the best.
There was a new contributor on Fox last night – I didn’t catch his name.
He had a great comment on this issue:
The only thing that matters is that the crowd at the Trump inaugural was bigger than the crowd at the Hillary inaugural.
Why isn’t anyone calling out the media for their lie?
Best Tweet on the subject:
Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63
Obvious lies serve a purpose for an administration. They watch who challenges them and who loyally repeats them. The people must watch, too.
7:21 PM · Jan 21, 2017
Because they’re not NeverMedia!
EH, that’s analysis as detailed as a briefing in Mission: Impossible. Bravo for the info search. No sale, though. I don’t work in the news media, but I have eyes. Obama’s crowd was bigger. So what? What does it prove? That, as other commenters have said, that the Inauguration took place in a 70% black city where Trump got roughly 8% of the vote? So why bother to treat it the way Spicer did on Saturday?
How does it advance Trump’s cause to stall the truck on this particular set of railroad tracks? Let it go.
And now CNN weighs in. First the drive by “small crowd” story.
Now, days after the event, they have put together an interactive gigapixel which tells a different story.
Here’s a screen capture from the gigapixel which was taken at showtime, looking down the Mall.
I think @walterolson is missing the point. There’s nothing unusual in American history about a rabidly partisan press. It’s just that the NYT and its bedfellows have spent a long time cultivating the image of being above all that, of professionalism, of telling a story fully. They have been squandering that political capital for years, and the fact that they are a leading cog in the Democrat propaganda machine is getting more obvious. But rather than reform, they decided to bet the farm to get Hillary elected. They failed.
The media except, mostly, Fox is at war with Trump now and was throughout the campaign. During the campaign the crowd size at Trump’s rallies was systematically underreported. This is not a “he said” “they said” story, though that is how it is framed by the enemedia.
Trump had over 900,000 attendees at rallies all over the country; even if some went to multiple events that’s a lot of people. The adults will all have compared the news coverage of “their” rallies to their own impressions. All too often what they saw would lead them to conclude that the reporting, both local and national was lies. And Trump has Twitter.
I don’t doubt that the Obama crowd in DC was a little bigger, especially in a Democrat city rioting to keep Republicans away. After all, the 2009 picture was of an historic event, perhaps attended by many Republicans, too. My point is the left is using lies and deceptions to paint Trump as a liar when at best one could say is they disagree with his opinion. I heard someone make a good point yesterday, contrasting the assault on Rep Joe Wilson when he truthfully said “You lie” with the media’s and the left’s freely calling Trump a liar (when the accusation is misplaced). The left has a grand strategy and we better recognize how each tactic fits into this strategy.
I think you might not be getting why Trump is having such an effect. Trump needs to push back on every lie, every attempt to delegitimize his presidency.
Don’t ever forget how many people still think GW Bush served a plastic turkey to the troops!