by John Gibson
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This weekend–Donald Trump’s first days as President–we saw the media go into a whirling dervish over President Trump and his Press Secretary saying things the media doesn’t approve.
The issue that brought on the heavy breathing was the size of the crowd that gathered to watch Donald Trump inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States.
The New York Times tweeted side by side pictures of the 2009 crowd for Obama and the 2017 crowd for Trump. The paper then doubled down with a story about how Trump went to the CIA for speech and repeated the “false claim” –read “lie”–that his crowd as a yuuuge as any in history.
Let’s be honest, ok? What the pictures really showed, of course, was that President elect Trump could not draw a crowd of African Americans and residents of Democrat heavy Washington D.C. as large as the crowd President-elect Obama drew.
Should be no surprise. President Obama was the first African American President. Black people were thrilled and gathered, thousands upon thousands, to witness his inauguration. On the other hand, Donald Trump was not a first, by any means. He was, obviously, not the first white President and his crowd–enthusiastic supporters, to be sure– was more reflective of the plain Jane fact that another President was being inaugurated.
However, the Trump team knew what the New York Times was up to: it was trying, once again, to diminish the incoming President, another brick in the wall of the “delegitimizing project” of Donald Trump by the media.
So Sean Spicer, President Trump’s new Press Secretary, went before the White House Press corps on Saturday and said more people witnessed the Trump inauguration than any previous, “Period.” (A careful reading of the transcript shows Spicer was referring to the global witnessing of the inauguration, including both in person attendance and worldwide television.)
That set off another round of media outrage, the most prominent example of which was Chuck Todd of NBC sputtering at Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway that she and Spicer and Trump were engaged in telling the American people “falsehoods”. The clever and unflappable Ms. Conway then countered that no, the Trump team was using what she termed “alternative facts”.
Such phrasing is bound to explode on Twitter and it did (“I’m not drunk. I’m ‘alternative sober.'”)
But it also caused a massive gasp in the political media: “just lies” said the former editor of the New York Times, writing in The Guardian; “the end of trustworthy government” said Forbes; Conway “stirs mockery, concern” said NBC News; dictionary “schools” Conway said USA Today; the cost of “Trump branded reality” wrote the media reporter at the New York Times; 85 year old Dan Rather “blasts White House” reported the Huffington Post.
All of which probably left real Americans–the ones who don’t collect paychecks tsk-tsking Republican Presidents–wondering what was everybody so worked up about.
Haven’t we seen Trump make grandiose, over-the-top statements before? What’s new about that? People didn’t vote for him because he can eyeball a crowd and correctly estimate it was bigger/smaller than any previous crowd. They voted for him as a break–a rejection, actually– from the past.
And they also wonder–quite rightly–if this group of press types got this worked up about White House lies from the past eight years–if you like your plan you can keep your plan, the Benghazi attack was a spontaneous demonstration over an anti Mohammad movie, the IRS didn’t target conservatives, the U.S. government didn’t supply weapons to drug cartels in the Fast and Furious operation, and more.
The fact of the matter is that the incoming administration is playing the media and the media–with stunning predictability–is falling for it.
As Cokie Roberts put it on the ABC program This Week, “We’re talking about Trump, not the women’s march.”
Bingo.
Well played Trump team, well played.