Washington: President Donald Trump used his first full day in office Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.
In a visit to the CIA designed to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticising the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago.
He also called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that as many as 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved.
Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where he delivered a scolding to reporters and made a series of false statements. Spicer said that news organisations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.
The statements from the new president and his spokesman came as hundreds of thousands of people protested against Trump, a crowd that appeared to dwarf the one that had gathered the day before when he was sworn in. The remarks were a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency, usually a time when the White House works to set a tone of national unity and build confidence in a new leader.
Instead, the president and his team appeared embattled and defensive, signalling that the pugnacious style Trump employed as a candidate will persist now that he has ascended to the nation’s highest office.
Saturday was supposed to be a day for Trump to mend fences with an intelligence community he had publicly scorned, with an appearance at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. While he was lavish in his praise, the president focused in his 15-minute speech on his complaints about news coverage of his criticism of the nation’s spy agencies and meandered to other topics, including the crowd size at his inauguration, his level of political support, his mental age and his intellectual heft.
“I just want to let you know, I am so behind you,” Trump told more than 300 employees assembled in the lobby for his remarks.
In recent weeks, Trump has questioned the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia meddled in the US election on his behalf. After the disclosure of a dossier with unsubstantiated claims about Trump, he accused the intelligence community of allowing the leak and wrote on Twitter: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
On Saturday, he said journalists were responsible for any suggestion that he was not fully supportive of intelligence agencies’ work.
“I have a running war with the media,” Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”
“The reason you’re the No. 1 stop is, it is exactly the opposite,” Trump added. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.”
Trump also took issue with news reports about the number of people who attended his inauguration, complaining that the news media used photographs of “an empty field” to make it seem as if his inauguration did not draw many people.
“We caught them in a beauty,” Trump said of the news media, “and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
Spicer said that Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” a statement that photographs clearly show to be false. Spicer said photographs of the inaugural ceremonies were deliberately framed “to minimise the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” although he provided no proof of either assertion.
Photographs of Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 and of Trump’s plainly showed that the crowd Friday was significantly smaller, but Spicer attributed that disparity to new white ground coverings he said had caused empty areas to stand out and to security measures that had blocked people from entering the Mall.
“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Spicer said. He also admonished a journalist for erroneously reporting Friday that Trump had removed a bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office, calling the mistake — which was corrected quickly — “egregious.”
And he incorrectly claimed that ridership on Washington’s subway system was higher than on Inauguration Day in 2013. In reality, there were 782,000 riders that year, compared with 571,000 riders this year, according to figures from the transit authority.
Spicer also said that security measures had been extended farther down the National Mall this year, preventing “hundreds of thousands of people” from viewing the ceremony. But the Secret Service said the measures were largely unchanged this year, and there were few reports of long lines or delays.
Commentary about the size of his inauguration crowd made Trump increasingly angry Friday, according to several people familiar with his thinking.
On Saturday, he told his advisers that he wanted to push back hard on “dishonest media” coverage — mostly referring to a Twitter post from a New York Times reporter showing side by side frames of Trump’s crowd and Obama’s in 2009. But most of Trump’s advisers urged him to focus on the responsibilities of his office during his first full day as president.
However, in his remarks at the CIA, he wandered off topic several times, at various points telling the crowd he felt no older than 39 (he is 70); reassuring anyone who questioned his intelligence by saying, “I’m, like, a smart person”; and musing out loud about how many intelligence workers backed his candidacy.
“Probably everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did,” Trump said. “We’re all on the same wavelength, folks.”
Nick Shapiro, who served as chief of staff to John O. Brennan, who resigned Friday as the CIA director, said Brennan was “deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandisement in front of CIA’s Memorial Wall of agency heroes.
“Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself,” Shapiro added.
“I was heartened that the president gave a speech at CIA,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency. “It would have been even better if more of it had been about CIA.”
Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that he had had high hopes for Trump’s visit as a step to begin healing the relationship between the president and the intelligence community but that Trump’s speech had dashed them.
“While standing in front of the stars representing CIA personnel who lost their lives in the service of their country — hallowed ground — Trump gave little more than a perfunctory acknowledgement of their service and sacrifice,” Schiff said. “He will need to do more than use the agency memorial as a backdrop if he wants to earn the respect of the men and women who provide the best intelligence in the world.”
Trump said nothing during the visit about how he had mocked the CIA and other intelligence agencies as “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” He did not mention his apparent willingness to believe Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who is widely detested at the CIA, over his own intelligence agencies.
