What’s the difference between lies and alternative facts? It seems that President Trump and his press secretary, Sean Spicer, don’t see any difference at all. At the first press conference of the new administration, Spicer blasted the media for falsely reporting the number of people at Trump’s inauguration. Spicer claimed that photos of the crowd on the National Mall were framed in a way to mislead the public about the number of people in attendance.
President Trump later reiterated Spicer’s claim during his speech to CIA employees in Virginia. Moreover, he upped the ante by greatly inflating the size of his inauguration audience, calling it the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration. Why do Trump and his team have such contempt for the truth?
Neither Trump nor Spicer offered any hard facts to disprove the media’s report of a low turnout. Instead, they said that changes in infrastructure made it appear as if there was a low turnout. However, metrics don’t lie. The media didn’t maliciously attempt to undermine Trump. It was just reporting the news. Deliberately blurring the line between reality and fiction is a form of propaganda, and Trump’s propaganda machine was in full swing on Saturday.
President Donald Trump doesn’t like to lose. Millions of people protested his presidency on Saturday, calling him out for misogyny and racism. The number of people that took to the streets of Washington in a wave of “women’s marches” was far greater that the number of people who watched Trump get sworn in as the 45th President of America.
By the end of day two of the Trump presidency, proceedings at the White House had turned into a bad episode of reality TV. Instead of talking about foreign policy or attempting to unite a broadly divided nation, President Trump and his team debated numbers, politics and the future of America becoming nothing more than Nielsen ratings.