It’s hard to believe how many lies we’ve endured as a country since January 2017. Sure, there are lie counters and there are fact checkers and there are even some in the media who are beginning to say “lied” instead of “misspoke” or “overstated,” or any of the other soft words for Donald Trump’s greatest strength.
But it never hurts to go back to the beginning and see where it all started. Before Trump lied about wiretaps in Trump Tower, before he lied about Michael Flynn, before he lied about Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, there was one of the biggest lies of all to kick off his presidency: The size of his inauguration crowd.
At this point, no serious historian, scholar, or person with eyeballs and a general sense of math and depth perception disagrees: Trump’s inaugural crowd was not only not the largest in history, it was actually one of the smallest.
Further infuriating Trump was the fact that the Women’s March on Washington actually did set a record — as the largest public protest in the history of the United States. In fact, the four largest civic protests in America have all taken place since he took office, each with crowds absolutely dwarfing the number of those who showed up for the inauguration.
But to drive his point home during his first interview after becoming President with ABC’s David Muir, he couldn’t help but justify his lies about the crowd by saying he wanted to make sure that his voters were “no longer forgotten” by the media:
I said the men and women that I was talking to, who came out and voted, would never be forgotten again. Therefore, I won’t allow you, or other people like you, to demean that crowd.”
The two eventually moved on in the interview, but as it wrapped up, Trump couldn’t resist bringing David to the hallway where he had already ordered pictures of the inauguration mounted, so that he could show off the “historic” crowd once again:
One thing this shows is how far over they go here. Look, look how far this is… Nobody sees that. You don’t see that in the pictures. But when you look at this tremendous sea of love…it’s really something special that all these people traveled here from all parts of the country, maybe the world…they loved what I had to say, but more importantly, they’re gonna love the result.”
It was ridiculous. Trump treated the election as a popularity contest, and the fact is, he actually lost that contest. But we remember.
You can watch our segments of the interview below:
Featured image via screen capture
