For all those who participated in Saturday’s #womensmarch in Washington, all around the nation, and even all around the world, thank you. For times so unsure and dangerous, we need to be reminded of how resilient and strong we can and should be. Yet, as much as we need to try to affect what’s going on, we also need to make sure we keep up with what’s going on.
While no major policy initiatives have yet to be launched (not counting the executive order that begins the undermining of Obamacare) and no additional Cabinet nominated have been confirmed nor sworn in, President Trump’s first full day offered a glimpse into how the newly-minted administration will approach the press and the dissemination of information. Trump himself addressed the CIA, partly affirming his support for intelligence agencies and partly thrashing the media for being “among the most dishonest human being on Earth.” This, of course, does not apply to the more Trump-friendly outlets such as Fox News, who Trump specifically tweeted thanks to for the “GREAT reviews.”
While the first official White House press briefing is not scheduled until Monday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer took Saturday afternoon to roundly scold the White House Press Corps. for “deliberately false reporting,” including the coverage of the crowds in attendance for the inauguration. Photos depicting crowd sizes of the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations seemingly show that more people were in attendance for Obama’s first inauguration than for Trump’s. Yet, Spicer emphatically claims that the crowd in attendance Friday was the “largest audience to witness an inauguration period, both in person and around the world.”
The only “evidence” Spicer uses to substantiate this claim is Washington Metro ridership numbers, yet the numbers he gave turned out to be inaccurate. While he states there were 420,000 trips using the Metro compared to 317,000 for the 2013 inauguration, the ridership numbers according to WMATA officials are around 570,557 trips for Friday compared to 1.1 million and 782,000 for the 2009 and 2013 inaugurations, respectively. Individual estimates, as the National Park Service does not supply crowd estimates, only corroborate that less were in attendance this year than in 2009.
To those paying attention to Trump’s rhetoric regarding the media, these hostile and deceptive approaches toward a critical press are not surprising in the least. The difference today, as opposed to a year ago when Trump was only a candidate, is that this approach now is to be adopted by a whole branch of the Federal government rather than a single campaign. We all know that politicians enact a certain charade to delicately spin truths, to obfuscate, to dance around questions, to twist words into technicalities that offer them the least amount of liability. This is not what the Trump administration is doing. We have not seen an administration so explicitly trying to pass off lies as the truth and use the office of the presidency to delegitimize truths that don’t fit in a “Make America Great Again”-type narrative.
We can no longer trust that the Federal Executive Branch to not outright defraud the American public. And that is absolutely terrifying.
