Sean Spicer’s second press conference (23 Jan) was considerably better than the first one. His tone was much more moderated and he seemed more in command of the proceedings. Oddly, he called on the New York Post first, which I understand in some circles is considered a newspaper.
One rather obvious thing I noticed about Spicer’s second press conference: Everyone asked really good questions about Trump’s plans and policies … except the major television news networks. They all insisted on talking about the inauguration crowd and “alternative facts.” (Spicer walked back his comments from Saturday quite a bit, by the way, admitting that he had given incorrect facts regarding the Metro–you’d never know that by looking at Twitter.)
On ACA (20 Jan): This seems more like a feel-good action to me, ie. catnip for Republicans. Just done so he can say that he fulfilled a campaign promise. Congress is the one who actually has to change the ACA, and they will need Democratic votes to do it.
On No New Regulations (20 Jan): I don’t fully understand the purpose of this one. Presumably there was some regulation or regulations in the pipeline that Trump did not want to go through without further evaluation.
On Mexico City (23 Jan): I don’t know enough about this to comment. I have no idea what is happening in Mexico City. However I suspect that Mike Pence had a great deal to do with this. I don’t think Trump gives a whit about abortion.
On TPP (23 Jan): My understanding is that Congress was well on the way toward killing TPP anyway, and Trump’s order is moot. Basically he’s taking credit for killing something that was already dead.
On Hiring Freeze (23 Jan): Whatever. It’s another feel-good policy, catnip for Republicans. There’s language in there that basically says, “But if you really need to hire someone, go ahead.”
On Pipelines (24 Jan): I don’t have much of a dog in this fight. I don’t live where the pipelines are going to be. With only the briefest of glances several months back on #NoDAPL, it appeared that Big Oil had done their due diligence, but if I did live there, I’m sure I’d be really mad about it too. On the other hand, my car doesn’t go anywhere without gasoline.
Repeal And Replace Theatre
By the way, I happened to see Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-MA) and Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) briefing on the Senate Republican plan to replace the ACA, which they called the Patient Freedom Act. I know nothing about healthcare and insurance, but it sounded okay to me. Those two seem like reasonable Republicans. A key component of the plan was allowing states to continue using Obamacare if they wished, which sounds like a clever way to get enough votes to pass it.
Kellyanne Conway said on Meet The Press Sunday morning that Spicer had provided “alternative facts” in his press briefing.
I just watched the clip for the first time when I embedded it in this post. She is unbelievable. If I had a news show, I would never invite her back.
Anyway, “alternative facts” became an Internet meme immediately.
In that clip Chuck Todd responded that “alternative facts” were “falsehoods.”
I agree with that, but we must be very careful here because many of the things that Spicer claimed in his press briefing were (or could be) factually correct. That’s the thing about political double-speak and propaganda: Most of the time, correct facts are used. It’s just that they are used incorrectly, or out of context, and it paints a misleading picture.
We must also be careful not to laugh at Conway, Mr. Chuck Todd. I know it’s really tempting, but that is exactly the kind of attitude that drove millions of people to vote for Donald Trump. Conservatives typically think of themselves as wise elders, and they absolutely live by the creed that you should respect your elders above everything else. People of that mindset will shut down immediately if you show disrespect for them. Kellyanne Conway knows thats, and will take advantage of that. You could see it right in that clip how she was playing the role of victim for the benefit of the Trump base.
P. S. Conway should have called them “additional facts.”
Well Trump certainly knows how to set a tone, I’ll give him that.
I specifically linked to CNN’s YouTube video because if Twitter is to be believed, they did not cover the briefing live, and I give them high marks for that.
CNN did not carry @seanspicer’s White House briefing live.
I ragged on them a little bit about backing down in Trump’s press conference, but they are coming out swinging now, which is appropriate.
All of the above aside, I wanted to take a little bit of time and play devil’s advocate. I want to examine the validity of what Spicer said. I didn’t see Spicer’s comments live, I only saw the Internet reactions to them, which can basically be summed up with, “Spicer just blatantly lied to us.” Later, when I actually watched the actual press conference (the video above), I didn’t think it was quite as cut-and-dried as the Internet made it seem.
First we should all be aware that the press secretary’s job is literally to lie to us on behalf of the president. It’s been like that for a long time. Even Obama’s press secretary lied to us. I don’t have any specific examples, but I’m confident that somebody could find some. If they didn’t outright lie, they certainly bent or spun the truth periodically. I’m guessing some of those instances might involve drones or Guantanamo Bay.
So don’t kid yourselves that this is the first time a press secretary has ever spun the truth before.
I’ll admit it seemed pretty blatant in this case, though.
“A reporter falsely tweeted out that the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office”
“Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall”
“This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.”
“This was also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past.”
“Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted.”
“No one had numbers, because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out.”
“By the way, this applies to any attempts to try to count the number of protestors today in the same fashion.”
“We know that from the platform where the President was sworn in, to 4th Street, it holds about 250,000 people. From 4th Street to the media tent is about another 220,000. And from the media tent to the Washington Monument, another 250,000 people. All of this space was full when the President took the Oath of Office.”
“We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural.”
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
“Even the New York Times printed a photograph showing a misrepresentation of the crowd in the original Tweet in their paper, which showed the full extent of the support, depth in crowd, and intensity that existed.” [I personally think he flubbed reading this line. He simultaneously said the NYT misrepresented things and then said it was a good picture. I’m not sure what he meant.]
I’ll take these in order. I feel like I’m writing for Snopes. :)
This is true. A reporter mistakenly claimed the MLK bust had been removed, when it hadn’t been. It was corrected, but you only get one chance to get it right the first time. I fully admit that reporters make mistakes in their haste to get a scoop, particularly on Twitter. [Update: More on Snopes.]
The “one particular tweet” is not referenced, but one could assume the picture is the comparison the New York Times tweeted below. I do believe it’s true that those photographs were intentionally framed to show that Trump’s inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama’s inauguration crowd. In this particular case, it looks like very little had to be done in order to frame it that way, but it is definitely a frame. This is a time-honored political tradition. One could argue all day long whether it’s fair or not, but it is a simple fact that one picture looks like a ton of people, while the other picture does not, and those who did vote for Trump hate it, while those who didn’t vote for Trump love it. Photographs are powerful political persuasion tools.
Floor coverings were definitely used. All the white in the right photo below, one could assume, were covered areas. Presumably they did this because the crowd at Obama’s inauguration really trashed the place. [Update: Added link.]
The implication here is that more people would have appeared in the photo, except that there were more barriers in place to prevent people from getting to the inauguration in time. It’s plausible, but again, we don’t know when the photo on the right was taken, so we can’t really make a judgment on it. My personal speculation is that the photo on the right was taken one or two hours prior to the Oath of Office, based on my observations of a live stream (see below). It’s conceivable that the space could fill in during that time, but I doubt it.
I believe it true that people tweeted inaccurate crowd sizes, because there is no record of the crowd size.
To the best of my knowledge, it is true that the National Park Service does not count the attendees at an inauguration or release estimates. Whatever numbers you hear about the size of the crowd is estimated by third parties. Why? I don’t know exactly, but it’s probably because that number is extremely volatile politically, don’t you think?
I haven’t seen any estimates of the number of protesters at the 2017 Inauguration, so I can’t comment. It’s undoubtedly true, though, that a precise mathematical figure does not exist.
I have never heard these numbers before and can’t comment. I am tired of writing this post and can’t be bothered to try to verify them. The claim that “all of this space was full” is very debatable. Let’s assume the NYT photo is fake and can’t be trusted. I did a little digging on my own and watched some of the Inauguration live stream found on the Committee’s web site (see below). In my screen grab, all of that space does not appear to be full.
This post is getting very long, and I can’t verify those DC Metro numbers. I wouldn’t even know where to go to look anyway. Is it true? I don’t know. Is it plausible? Sure. Is it an open-and-shut slam dunk case? No. A huge number of variables could affect whether that number is meaningful or not.
I don’t believe it was the largest audience to witness an Inauguration in person. It’s plausible that it was the largest worldwide audience for an Inauguration, though, when you count people watching television and live streams both in the United States and abroad. I personally witnessed several Twitter users from other countries talking about it as it happened. I don’t care to investigate concrete numbers, and I doubt they would be available yet anyway. So is this truth or spin? Oh it’s definitely spin, because it’s unlikely that concrete mathematical numbers are available or ever will be available. [Update: It’s plausible to me simply because the technology of streaming video is so much more prevalent today than it was in 2009, and more people would have access to it today than in 2009.]
I’m not entirely sure what Spicer was trying to say here. I think he was trying to say that the NYT printed a photo which showed a massive attendance, but flubbed it. The photo that the NYT tweeted below shows a full attendance, but only in the first section nearest the podium, which I agree was full.
First I want to say that I completely believe that there were fewer attendants at Trump’s inauguration than at Obama’s inauguration. Obama was the first African-American U. S. president in history. Trump wasn’t. It makes perfect sense that Obama’s would have more than Trump’s.
But.
I have looked and looked, but I cannot find the source for the photo on the right. The New York Times credits the “58th Presidential Inaugural Committee” in the picture, which I think is supposed to be the Joint Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.
However if you Google those exact words you get www.58pic2017.org. Way down at the bottom of the page it says “paid for by the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committe.” There are no photographs on that web site, only a live stream archive showing the Inaugural Ball, the night of the 20th. It’s possible that the frame below right image in the comparison above was taken from the live stream of the inauguration, which is now gone, but I can’t confirm or deny. [Update: Paragraph edited for clarity.]
Could it have been taken at 9:00 AM instead of 11:00 AM? Absolutely. Does that matter? Absolutely. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance both before and after the actual Oath of Office.
Speaking of sources, where did that one on the left come from? It’s credited to “Getty Images” in the picture. At appears to be this one, which will cost you a cool $595 to use. I can’t help but note that the image description does not say what time the picture was taken, either.
If you go to Inaugural.senate.gov, which is the home of the Joint Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, there is a 6 hour live stream archive of the Inauguration. The camera only shows the view from the podium side, but there is one point where the camera does a pan from the back to the front. I captured this picture:
You can see the white covering in the image there as well. There isn’t a time stamp on the video, but I would estimate it to be roughly an hour before the Oath of Office. This image was broadcast just about the time that Trump’s sons and daughters arrived on the stage.
It looks like there could be more people than that Twitter image suggests, but there is still a fair amount of empty space that wasn’t there in 2009.
Obviously the camera angle matters, too. The lower the camera angle, the more populated the crowds appear.
Here’s my conclusion: The 2017 Inauguration crowd size was smaller than the 2009 Inauguration crowd size, but by how much will remain debatable. I don’t think it was as much smaller as the left might want, but I can stipulate it was noticeably smaller.
I would like to see a comparison between the crowd size in 2017 and the crowd size in 2001, which is a comparison that makes more sense to me. Both of those years was a change from a Democratic president to a Republican president. And then I’d like to see a comparison to 1993. I would guess that 2017, 2001, and 1993 were similar, which would make Trump’s inauguration an “average” crowd size, thus meaningless to both sides of the political spectrum.
I predict that in future Inaugurations, steps will be taken to prevent taking pictures of the National Mall from the reverse side (I presume those pictures were taken from the Washington Monument). It’s too much of a political hot button now.
I was looking around for a good source of what Trump is actually doing in office, in terms of executive orders, bills he is signing, etc. It’s a little distressing to see that even though we know Trump has already signed an Executive Order, that page on WhiteHouse.gov is still very blank. Most of the government sources I would normally go to are still showing Obama stuff. But I found this on VICE:
I don’t like linking to VICE because I wouldn’t normally consider that a credible source, but what it does have is an actual link to Executive Order 1 “Minimizing the economic burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act pending repeal” (on Politico.com). I have no idea where that PDF came from. I can’t find a credible source, so it might be made up out of thin air, for all I know. Politico has enough of a reputation that I don’t think they’d risk that, though.
As of this writing, Trump has signed the above Executive Order 1 (which in my opinion is mostly bluster), Senate Bill 81 which is a waiver to allow General James Mattis to serve as Secretary of Defense, and Proclamation 1 “declaring a National Day of Patriotism” (basically a pointless gesture to make those people you hate on Facebook feel better). There’s no link to a document there, which is annoying.
However I think the gravitas of protests are slightly undermined when all you see or hear about it are the funny signs. It makes it look more like a funny sign competition than a serious political statement. It would have more of a frightening effect if there were no signs at all.
Either that or the signs should be, you know, frightening, not funny. I mean, the point of a protest march is the scare the crap out of the government, right? To overwhelm the police force through sheer numbers? To show you have the numbers to literally run over all obstructions, into the White House, to tear the president into little pieces with your bare hands? Julius Caesar style?
It’s not to have a good time and get your picture in the paper.
Just my two cents.
Someday we’ll get this government protest thing right. We’re still a nation of entitled, complacent, comfortable, wealthy, narcissistic people, when compared to, say, the people in Syria.
I’m really glad to see that “Nazi” is a word that isn’t being devalued. You know, those folks who were generally responsible for 60 million people dying in World War II. I think it’s cool that we now use that same word to describe random people who say dumb stuff. Nothing at all wrong with equating those two things. In a way, it really honors the sacrifice of those 60 million dead people, don’t you think? #satire #sarcasm #wordsdontmatteranymore
I’m going to start this thing where I highlight I tweet I saw going around and then explain why it’s bad to retweet it, highlighting the general misinformation that it carries. I can’t do this on Twitter because, you know, 140 characters.
Twitter in Trump era: 1) Trump bans national parks from tweeting, even on safety 2) Twitter forces users to follow Trump, even if they block
The above tweet is going around right now. I saw it first on my gaming account. It’s one those tweets that make it sound like it’s a slam-dunk, open-and-shut-case, can’t-possibly-argue-with-this-logic kind of thing.
Wellllllll.
There’s just a lot to unpack there. And that’s why Twitter and Facebook are so dangerous to political discourse.
First of all, Twitter is a private organization, and Trump doesn’t run it. It is likely that a group in the White House staff runs that account, possibly even the very same people who ran Obama’s feed. I would be surprised if Trump himself uses it, because why would he? He’s got his own account.
Moving on.
I’ll paraphrase Hanlon’s razor again: Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
On “Twitter forces users to follow Trump,” my guess is that they made a list of people who were following @POTUS on a particular date, and then used that list to manually set those users to follow @POTUS again after they had renamed @POTUS to @POTUS44. It’s likely they made that list long before the Inauguration, as I imagine they prepared it well in advance. In other words, long before everyone unfollowed @POTUS.
Now that I think about it, it’s possible that the White House is the one who did what I’ll call the Follower Migration. It could be done through the Twitter API, I would think. Follow people, that is. Who knows? Let’s try looking for some actual facts about this:
Here’s an article from Wired, which I would generally consider to be a trusted source for technical news: Twitter insists it isn’t making everyone follow @POTUS. Basically what I theorized. They are having to manually do this migration with a script. It confirms that Twitter is the agent making the change, not a government agency. Look there, I did some research and learned a thing. It’s what everyone should do before retweeting something. I know, it’s hard. It’s why I stopped political blogging. It’s impossible to keep up with the speed of Twitter retweets.
By the way, yes I’m following @POTUS. I’m an informed citizen. Democracy depends on me.
On “Trump bans national parks from tweeting,” this is an oversimplification of what actually happened. I saw this article on The Hill before I saw the retweet: Interior Dept. banned from tweeting after posting photo of inauguration crowd. I’m still a bit undecided about the credibility of The Hill. It seems like a gossip rag for political wonks, but a lot of politicos reference it. They certainly spam their stories a lot on Twitter, if nothing else.
A government official familiar with the stand-down said the agency needed to investigate whether the retweets were purposeful, “errant” or “whether we’ve been hacked.”
Sounds plausible to me.
So even as that retweet saying Trump “bans national parks from tweeting” is flying around today, @NatlParkService is back online, posting tweets. And this may come as a shock to people, but the federal government has always had strict guidelines about social media engagement, which were developed during Obama’s administration.
Personally, I doubt Trump ever even knew about it. It’s unlikely he was personally involved in any of it. He was at the Inaugural Ball or something.
[Updated to add link to Dept. of Interior social media guidelines.]
You may or may not know that in the days before the Inauguration, there was a big campaign on the Twitters to remind everyone to unfollow the @POTUS account. Personally I felt this was silly, and possibly the most ineffective form of government protest imaginable, not to mention irresponsible citizenship. “Hey, we have a frightening president now, let’s not look at anything he’s doing! That’ll keep us safe!”
Anyway, roughly the time of the Inauguration, Twitter renamed the @POTUS account to @POTUS44 to keep an archive of Barack Obama’s tweets. It’s apparently run by the National Archives, which makes sense. That action meant that everyone effectively unfollowed Trump’s @POTUS automatically, rendering the whole unfollow campaign beforehand moot.
If that had been the end of it, I wouldn’t even be posting this.
Twitter apparently then got the bright idea to migrate everyone who had previously followed Obama’s @POTUS to Trump’s @POTUS. That wouldn’t have been so bad if they had gotten the list of who was following @POTUS at the time of the Inauguration, but it seems that they must have compiled the list of people who followed @POTUS some time in the past, because people suddenly found that they were following @POTUS again even though they had previously unfollowed it.
This did not go over too well in the Twitter community.
Again there were campaigns to remind everyone to double-check to make sure they weren’t “forced” to re-follow @POTUS. Because apparently this is the most important thing in the world for people to do in the Trump era.
Before anyone starts trying to help me by examining my followers, I’m still following @POTUS. I’m not going to unfollow it, because as I hinted above, that’s a bit childish and irresponsible. As a U.S. citizen, I kind of want to know what @POTUS is putting out there.
Besides, the very idea that one is taking a stand against tyranny by unfollowing a Twitter account is, well, incomprehensible to me. Twitter is just a dumb web site. It’s not a government agency, it’s not a system of record, it’s not any part of the legislative, executive, or judicial branches.
I didn’t watch the Inauguration, not for political reasons, but because I was at work. However I saw a lot of tweets related to it.
For example, I saw a lot of tweets saying something along the lines of, “It’s only been X minutes and Y has been removed from the White House web site.”
Speaking from some personal experience, I was amazed to see that any government staff could make a web site change at all on a Friday. To expect government staff to get such web site changes right on the first try is somewhat like expecting the moon to turn purple. My personal guess is that somebody was just deleting random files on the production web server hoping to get the right outcome, and over the coming weeks, what they actually intended to do will eventually occur as the project leaders return from their extended vacations. [Update: This is a joke. My point is that the government doesn’t have a great track record with web sites. Remember Healthcare.gov?]
A previous co-worker of mine was fond of saying, “Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by ignorance.” I think it’s Hanlon’s Razor.
But even putting that point aside, a web site is just a web site. It’s not the law of the land. If you are really interested in knowing what the Trump administration is doing for reals, you should not be refreshing the White House web page.
You might instead wish to visit the National Archives at Archives.gov, which is where you will find a great many public records. One page you might be interested in the Federal Register. You might also wish to visit Congress.gov to see what your Congress is doing every day. [Update: I provided the wrong link. Here is a better Federal Register link. You can subscribe to get daily updates by mail or RSS.]
P. S. Lots of comments on crowd sizes today, too. I previously visited the topic of politicizing inauguration crowd sizes back in 2009. Comparing the crowds for “the first black president in American history” to “just another old white dude” is a little unfair, don’t you think? A more accurate comparison of crowd size photographs would be between 2017 and 2001. It was even raining both times. (That was back before everyone took a picture from that one spot to show the difference in crowd sizes, so good luck, Googlers.)
I swear, looking at my Twitter feed tonight, the night before The Inauguration Of Donald Trump, is like staring at alcoholics chugging down mixed drinks. This is probably the closest I will ever come to understanding what it must be like to be a parent to a stubborn teenaged child. It’s soooooo haaaaaard not to intervene and point out factual mistakes, or philosophical mistakes, or logical mistakes, or historical mistakes, or cognitive-behavioral mistakes. (Closing your eyes and pretending that reality doesn’t exist is not a healthy attitude!!) I’m reminded again and again of “dancing mania” and the phenomenon of mass hysteria. It’s fascinating and scary and sickening and discouraging all at the same time.
Personally, I think the next four years will be very unusual and extremely embarrassing, but that’s about it. At the end of Trump’s term, we non-partisans will be looking at some good things Trump did, and some bad things Trump did. (Like we are currently looking at some good things Obama did, and some bad things Obama did.)
Attention Virginians!
This might be an appropriate time to remind Virginians that we are electing a governor this year, 2017. Primaries are on June 13, and the general election is November 7. If you are at all affected by the 2016 presidential election, you want to get involved in this. Republican candidates that I know of currently are Ed Gillespie (the “RINO”) and Cory Stewart (the Trump surrogate). On the Democratic side we have Ralph Northam and Tom Perriello, neither of which I know much about. I’m guessing one of them is more progressive than the other. (Though here in Virginia, we only get but so progressive… nobody is giving up gun rights around here anytime soon.)
Comedy Relief
Here are some hilarious tweets I thought of today that I was terrified to publish in the current climate of political fear.
Triumpant Rs to scared Ds: “Now you’ll know how we felt for 8 yrs!” Not many people know America was founded on the principal of scaring half the people to death. #satire
A morning show interviewed Americans about new president. Pro and con to show both sides. Still getting it wrong. Unfair! #satire #centrism
I won’t be watching the inauguration. I didn’t watch Obama’s either. Or Bush’s. Or anyone’s. I protest boringness. #satire #centrism
This R-D-R-D-R cycle in American politics reminds me of that theory that the Earth’s magnetic poles flip periodically. #satire
The left thinks Democrats are weak and ineffectual, while the right thinks Republicans are weak and ineffectual. #centrism
I really don’t understand why a “bullet journal” isn’t called “a notebook with colorful writing and drawing in it.” #satire [That had nothing to do with politics, but I’ve read a lot about bullet journals lately. They are neat and all, but it’s just a notebook that you write in.]
I don’t share things, Facebook, but yes, I found all the things and solved all the puzzles and passed all the tests in that picture. #satire
