Donald Trump and his squad remind me of that old ’90s classic by En Vogue. The hook goes something like this: “Lies. Lies. Using lies as alibis. Lies. Lies. Just the devil in disguise.”
After vilifying the intelligence community after it reported that Russia definitively hacked the U.S. elections in his favor, President Donald Trump paid a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency on Saturday and tried to make nice with the community he recently likened to Nazis.
Trump was supposed to be visiting the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., to express his gratitude for the intelligence community, yet he spent about 30 seconds on that and the rest railing against the press and spouting falsehoods. And then he dispatched his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to tell some more lies.
Speaking at the CIA, Trump said, “I have a running war with the media.”
But as Ezra Klein of Vox noted, even that isn’t quite true. “His war isn’t with the media. Trump lives off media attention and delights in press coverage. His war is with facts,” writes Klein.
And so, on his first full day in office, the president of the United States went in on journalists for falsely reporting on the decor of his office and the size of the inaugural crowds (which anyone without eyes could see paled in comparison with President Barack Obama’s inaugurations or even the Women’s March on the Mall.)
So while he stood in a sacred place at the CIA, a place with memorial stars on its walls for those killed in the line of duty, the Associated Press reports that Trump berated a magazine journalist by name for an inaccurate report about Oval Office decor, one that had been quickly corrected.
Then he actually parted his lips to say that a million people came to his inauguration.
“It looked like a million, a million and a half people,” Trump said. “It’s a lie. We caught [the media]. We caught them in a beauty.”
This little sctick of lying and then accusing your opponent of doing the same is growing tired. The obvious aerial photos showing Obama’s first inauguration and Trump’s clearly prove that there were not as many people there.
Trump then actually claimed that the crowd for his swearing-in stretched down the National Mall to the Washington Monument. Not true.
And to top it off, the president accused television networks of showing “an empty field” and reporting that he drew just 250,000 people to witness Friday’s ceremony.
Then, in his first official White House press briefing, Trump press secretary Sean Spicer kept the lies going.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period—both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said, less than a minute after declaring that “no one had numbers,” reports the Washington Post.
Then Spicer said that ridership on Washington’s subway system on Friday was higher than for President Obama’s second inauguration. The Post reports that Spicer said that 420,000 people rode the Metro on Friday, while only 317,000 did so for Obama in 2013. Yet according to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, nearly 571,000 people rode on Friday, and 782,000 rode on Inauguration Day four years ago.
In fact, Politico reports that Spicer lied at least four times in as many minutes Saturday.
Trump and Spicer both tried to blame “the media” for his “fight” with the intelligence community. Yet the Washington Post notes that at a Jan. 11 news conference, Trump accused U.S. intelligence officials of being behind a Nazi-like smear campaign against him; he put quotation marks around the word “intelligence” in referring to such officials; and last weekend, he attacked the recently resigned head of the CIA John Brennan, suggesting that he was “the leaker of fake news.”
But as with the Women’s Marches across the globe—which Spicer did not take any questions on or even mention—the people had something for that ass.
Sunday morning, #SpicerFacts was trending on Twitter, calling out the press secretary for his obvious disregard of the truth in unique and hilarious ways.
Check out a few of the funniest:
And just so the circle of deceit is complete, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway got on Meet the Press on Sunday morning and said that Spicer’s lies are now called “alternative facts.” To which host Chuck Todd laughed in her face.
Good night, America.