According to a new report from The Washington Post, Donald Trump called National Park Service director Michael Reynolds on Saturday and asked for new aerial photographs of the crowd during the inauguration.
The Washington Post report says that Donald Trump believed the photos were inaccurate and that there must be others that could prove his personal estimate of the crowd size. By the way, Saturday was also the day that he went to the CIA to insult their memorial of fallen CIA members.
That means on the first full day of his presidency, Donald Trump thought his top priority to be calling the director of the National Park Service to try and bully him about his inauguration crowd size.
That means that Donald Trump didn’t think it important on his first day in office to work on creating jobs, improving national security or figuring out how to improve health care for Americans. Instead, Donald Trump worked on the pressing issue of crowd size.
Here are some excerpts from the Washington Post report:
On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration, acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds received an extraordinary summons: The new president wanted to talk to him.
In a Saturday phone call, Trump personally ordered Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall, according to three individuals who have knowledge of the conversation. The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.
Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
According to one account, Reynolds had been contacted by the White House and given a phone number to call. When he dialed it, he was told to hold for the president.
This is truly scary stuff. The new President of the United States has spent the bulk of his time in his first week in office pushing lies about how big his crowd size was. This is the stuff that dictators do. We are not supposed to see this stuff in a democracy.
The Washington Post went on to say, “Word rapidly spread through the agency and Washington. The individuals who informed The Washington Post about the call did so on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the conversation.”
And despite the fact that the National Park Service does not put out crowd size estimates, according to the Washington Post, “Experts, however, have estimated that the 2017 turnout was no more than a third the size of Obama’s eight years earlier.”
And apparently the Parks director was so rattled by the Trump request, he went out and found additional aerial photos of the inauguration crowd. The only problem? The photos didn’t prove Trump’s lie that the crowd size was a million or more people. So Trump and company didn’t release any photos.