Not a Tweet But Is It True?: Trump Says Crowd Was “A Million And A Half..”
Do not tell fibs to the CIA
“We had a massive field of people. You saw that. Packed,” he said. “I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, they show an empty field. I said, wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, it looked like a million, a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.” -President Donald John Trump
“It went all the way back to the Washington Monument,” Trump further claimed.
Meanwhile – On his first full day in the White House, President Trump went to the CIA.
His visit was presumably to make nice with the spy agency, yet the president could not help himself as he commented on what the news was reporting about his inauguration crowds.
But according to aerial photos and multiple NPR reporters on the ground, the crowd was nowhere near the Washington Monument (NPR News). The mall area near the monument was sparsely populated, and Trump didn’t offer any verification for where the ‘1 million to 1.5 million’ estimate came from, or for knocking down one news report’s estimate that there were only 250,000 people in attendance.
AND:
Trump also claimed that the rain should have scared people away, “But God looked down, and He said, ‘We’re not going to let it rain on your speech,’” and that, though he “got hit by a couple of drops” when he started his speech that the rain “stopped immediately …and then it became really sunny.”
In fact, neither of those claims is true. It was not sunny, and it was raining during Trump’s speech (check weather reports – NOAH) and remained overcast and cloudy.
But everyone dances to his own music:
Blue skies
-IRVING BERLIN
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see
I should care if the wind blows east or west
I should fret if the worst looks like the best
I should mind if they say it can’t be true
I should smile, that’s exactly what I do
