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.)
