It was a castoff pro-football player who offered some wise advice to President Trump on Monday, after a first few days in office marred by squabbles over how many people attended his inauguration.
“Yo @POTUS even I know to stay away from the notifications section on twitter,” wrote former Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel, who has struggled with fame and substance abuse.
“S— will drive you crazy,” Manziel added. “Lead the country and let them hate.”
Manziel’s counsel was even more relevant Monday afternoon, after White House press secretary Sean Spicer had concluded his first press briefing of the new administration.
Near the end of the more than hourlong back-and-forth with reporters, Spicer talked in emotional and evocative terms about the frustration inside the White House over the media’s coverage of Trump. Spicer seemed to be channeling the personal frustrations of Trump himself.
“The default narrative is always negative, and it’s demoralizing,” Spicer said of the press’ approach.
Spicer made his comments when asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta why he chose to make the inauguration crowd size an issue over the weekend. Spicer appeared in the briefing room Saturday afternoon to denounce reporters’ tweets that compared the size of Trump’s crowd with Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
Spicer incorrectly claimed, just as Trump himself had earlier Saturday, that the National Mall was full of people all the way from U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument. Trump’s inaugural crowd, in fact, ended several blocks short of the monument. Photographs of both years show a far bigger crowd in 2009 than for Trump’s inauguration, and crowd experts estimate Obama drew about 1.8 million people in 2009, compared with between 160,000 and250,000 for Trump this past weekend.
Spicer also quoted inaccurate statistics about Washington subway usage for Trump’s inauguration. Numbers provided by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority showed there were far more rides for both of Obama’s inauguration ceremonies.
Additionally, as Spicer spoke Saturday, there was a massive crowd filling much of the National Mall that was there to protest Trump’s inauguration. Photos, crowd experts and metro statistics have indicated that the anti-Trump protest was attended by two to three times the number of people who had been on the mall for Trump the day before.
Despite all this evidence, Spicer said that Trump had earned the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Spicer nearly shouted at the press, and then marched out Trump himself said earlier Saturday that the crowd looked to him like it was between 1 million and 1.5 million people The absurd and reality-denying statements by Trump and Spicer quickly permeated into popular culture. Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr joked about Spicer’s laughable exaggerations with reporters after his team’s game Sunday night in Orlando. The Dallas Stars of the National Hockey League, during a game with the Washington Capitals Saturday night, mocked the president by jokingly posting the attendance for the game on the Jumbotron as 1.5 million On Monday, the question was why? Why did the president, and Spicer, feel so strongly about crowd size, and why were they so focused on something so ultimately inconsequential when the more pressing issue was the job of running the government, which is a monumental task? Spicer went on at length to explain himself at Monday’s press briefing, after first admitting he had offered inaccurate numbers about Metro ridership and also acknowledging that Trump’s inauguration crowd had not actually set any in-person records. He maintained, without evidence, that the inauguration set global viewership records, challenging reporters to prove that it hadn’t.
In short, Spicer said, Trump has always been second-guessed, discounted, disbelieved and laughed at. It’s not just about a crowd size. It’s about this constant, you know, ‘He’s not going to run.’ Then, ‘If he runs, he’s going to drop out.’ Then, ‘If he runs, he can’t win, there’s no way he can win Pennsylvania, there’s no way he can win Michigan,’” Spicer said, playing out all the ways many in the media and in politics have dismissed Trump. It’s just unbelievably frustrating when you’re continually told it’s not big enough, it’s not good enough, you can’t win,” Spicer said It was an odd complaint from the spokesman for the man who just won the presidency of the United States, and now sits in charge of the entire executive branch. “He’s gone out there and defied the odds over and over and over again. And he keeps getting told what he can’t do by this narrative that’s out there. And he exceeds it every single time,” Spicer said.
Post a Comment