Winning isn't enough for Trump. He needs to have more. He cannot believe he didn't have the largest crowd ever to watch him being sworn in.
Trump pressured Park Service to find proof for his claims about inauguration crowd
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 inaugural 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.
For Trump, who sees himself and his
achievements in superlative terms, the inauguration’s crowd size has been a
source of grievance that he appears unable to put behind him. It is a measure
of his fixation on the issue that he would devote part of his first morning in
office to it — and that he would take out his frustrations on an acting Park
Service director.
Word rapidly spread through the agency and
Washington. The individuals who informed The Washington Post about the call
declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the conversation.
Neither Reynolds nor the Park Service would
talk about it.
“The National Park Service does not comment on
internal conversations among administration officials,” agency spokesman Thomas
Crosson said.
White House deputy press secretary Sarah
Huckabee Sanders said the call simply demonstrated that Trump’s management
style is to be “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”
“He’s not somebody who sits around and waits.
He takes action and gets things done,” Sanders said. “That’s one of the reasons
that he is president today, and Hillary Clinton isn’t.”
On Saturday, the same day Trump spoke with
Reynolds, the new president used an appearance at CIA headquarters to deliver a
blistering attack on the media for reporting that large swaths of the Mall were
nearly empty during the event.
“It’s a lie,” Trump said. “We caught [the
media]. We caught them in a beauty.”
“It looked like a million, a million and a half
people,” Trump said, vastly inflating what the available evidence suggested.
Later that day, White House press secretary
Sean Spicer reiterated Trump’s complaints about media coverage of the crowd in
a tongue-lashing from the lectern of the briefing room.
“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the
inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Spicer said.
The Park Service does not release crowd
estimates. Experts, however, have estimated that the 2017 turnout was no more
than a third the size of Obama’s eight years earlier.
Reynolds was taken aback by Trump’s request,
but he did secure some additional aerial photographs and forwarded them to the
White House through normal channels in the Interior Department, the people who
notified The Post said. The photos, however, did not prove Trump’s contention
that the crowd size was upward of 1 million.
Reynolds, who had served as the Park Service’s
deputy director of operations for six months before assuming the post of acting
director, is a third-generation employee who has worked there for more than
30 years. As deputy director, he oversaw the Park Service’s
$2.8 billion budget and more than 22,000 employees.
In the days since Trump’s election, the Park
Service has become an unlikely protagonist in a battle between the new
president and some career government employees.
No comments:
Post a Comment