This is beyond absurd.
“My crowd was bigger than your crowd,” Trump sends Spicer to lie. (Meaning that the crowd on the Mall in Washington for his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017 was larger than that for President Obama’s inauguration in 2009.)
First it was Trump’s inferiority about his hand size.
Then it was his inferiority about his inaugural crowd size.
I do not want to imagine what Trump is going to send Spicer out to talk about the size of next. (Yikes. Please, let there not be pictures.)
But, seriously.
We — yes us, ordinary Americans — have these things called computers that enable us to blow still pictures up and see what is in them in great detail. (I know, it’s amazing!)
Also, news organizations have these really expensive things called broadcast quality video cameras that they used to zoom in and take moving pictures (I know! It’s amazing!) of the people at the inaugurations. They’ve had them for years.
Do Spicer and Trump think that we cannot clearly see bodies in the picture from 2009 and also clearly see there are no bodies in the same places in 2017? (By the way, the “white ground covering used in 2017 and not in earlier inaugurations” claim by Spicer was a bald-faced lie. There is photographic evidence of ground cover used before.)
Although this ridiculousness is very, very bad, Trump’s asking/forcing his Press Secretary to call a news conference and explicitly lie to journalists — and refuse to take questions — is far worse.
Here is the point: If Trump and Spicer will lie about something as genuinely harmless as crowd sizes at inaugurations, imagine the lying and refusing to take questions that will happen when the topics are bombings, natural emergencies, emoluments, possible terrorist incidents, financial malfeasance, legislation, and possible corruption — topics that will surface (likely soon) and will actually matter?
Between this and Trump’s, even worse, lying his face off to the members of the CIA at Langley on Saturday, Jan. 21 — the first full day of the Trump presidency has been more disappointing and contained more omens of a scary future than I ever imagined.