'Alternative Facts': The Needless Lies of the Trump Administration
If the president and his aides will tell easily disproven falsehoods about crowd sizes and speeches, what else will they be willing to dissemble about?
One of the many things that is remarkable about the Trump administration is its devotion, even in its first days, to a particular variety of pointless falsehood.
Mendacity among politicians and the spokespeople hired to spin for them runs across eras and aisles, though it is true that some are more honest than others, and Donald Trump was a historically dishonest presidential candidate. But the Trump administration has displayed a commitment to needlessly lying that is confounding to even the most cynical observers of American politics.
No incident better summarizes this than a bizarre briefing by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday. Speaking in the Brady Briefing Room, Spicer laid into the assembled reporters.
“Yesterday, at a time when our nation and the world was watching the peaceful transition of power and, as the president said, the transition and the balance of power from Washington to the citizens of the United States, some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting,†he charged.
He then went on at length, attacking reporters, particularly one from The New York Times, for tweeting photographs comparing the size of the crowd at Friday’s inauguration unfavorably with Barack Obama’s first inauguration. (That image was retweeted from the National Park Service’s account, prompting a brief Twitter freeze at the Interior Department.)
“Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted,†Spicer continued, because the NPS did not count. (My colleague Robinson Meyer explained how crowd counts at events like the inauguration come about.) He incorrectly characterized ridership statistics provided by WMATA, D.C.’s transit authority.
Then came the big whopper: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.â€
Spicer’s statement required dismissing all available evidence: ridership count, eyewitness testimony, independent crowd-counts, and Nielsen television ratings. Spicer cut his teeth at the Republican National Committee as the combative voice of a body often at odds with the media, but even by those standards, his furious insistence on assertions at odds with the evidence were peculiar.
If the president and his aides will tell easily disproven falsehoods about crowd sizes and speeches, what else will they be willing to dissemble about?
One of the many things that is remarkable about the Trump administration is its devotion, even in its first days, to a particular variety of pointless falsehood.
Mendacity among politicians and the spokespeople hired to spin for them runs across eras and aisles, though it is true that some are more honest than others, and Donald Trump was a historically dishonest presidential candidate. But the Trump administration has displayed a commitment to needlessly lying that is confounding to even the most cynical observers of American politics.
No incident better summarizes this than a bizarre briefing by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday. Speaking in the Brady Briefing Room, Spicer laid into the assembled reporters.
“Yesterday, at a time when our nation and the world was watching the peaceful transition of power and, as the president said, the transition and the balance of power from Washington to the citizens of the United States, some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting,†he charged.
He then went on at length, attacking reporters, particularly one from The New York Times, for tweeting photographs comparing the size of the crowd at Friday’s inauguration unfavorably with Barack Obama’s first inauguration. (That image was retweeted from the National Park Service’s account, prompting a brief Twitter freeze at the Interior Department.)
“Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted,†Spicer continued, because the NPS did not count. (My colleague Robinson Meyer explained how crowd counts at events like the inauguration come about.) He incorrectly characterized ridership statistics provided by WMATA, D.C.’s transit authority.
Then came the big whopper: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.â€
Spicer’s statement required dismissing all available evidence: ridership count, eyewitness testimony, independent crowd-counts, and Nielsen television ratings. Spicer cut his teeth at the Republican National Committee as the combative voice of a body often at odds with the media, but even by those standards, his furious insistence on assertions at odds with the evidence were peculiar.
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