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10,000 People Showed Up for Trump’s Pre-Inauguration Concert. 400,000 Showed Up for Obama’s.

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40 Times More People Came for Obama 

Thursday afternoon Donald Trump held a concert to kick off his inauguration and a weekend of celebration at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The president-elect tried to spin it, suggesting that maybe no one had ever held a concert there, pretending there were “tens of thousands of people” there, filling the space, “all the way to the back.”

Trump told attendees, “This started out tonight being a small little concert, and then we had the idea maybe we’ll do it in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I don’t know if it’s ever been done before,” he said, according to Buzzfeed. “But if it has, very seldom. And the people came by the thousands and thousands, and here we are tonight, all the way back. All the way back.”

Later, at a donors’ dinner, Trump tried to spin a bit harder.

“We thought it would be a small concert and tens of thousands of people were there,” the president-elect said. “It went all the way to the back. They never had so many people. And very few people ever had a concert at the Lincoln Memorial.”

None of his remarks were true.

According to an MSNBC crowd estimate, 10,000 people showed.

Meanwhile, eight years ago, Barack Obama held a pre-inauguration concert at the National Mall. 

“Rap fans danced to country music, elderly white men high-fived with young African Americans and tears mixed with laughter as a varied lineup of A-list stars and an equally diverse crowd jammed the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the nation and its historic president-elect yesterday,” The Washington Post reported Jan. 19, 2009.

“By some estimates, more than 400,000 people filled the western end of the Mall for the official start of a three-day jubilee of prayers, parades and parties. They endured long security lines and chilly weather for a two-hour salute to the man who will be America’s first black president and to the nation that elected Barack Obama to the White House despite centuries of racial divisiveness.”

This tweet sums it up:

The photo above, a screenshot from CNN, was taken at 4:44 PM ET. Here’s video of Trump and his family arriving at 4:13 PM ET:

Many noted it didn’t help Trump wasn’t able to attract well-known talent:

Friday doesn’t appear to be much different. D.C. should be packed. Trump and his team have been falsely claiming dress shops and hotels are sold out but according to many, including one New York Times reporter, the city is conspicuously empty:

UPDATE:
Buzzfeed editor tweets there’s a light crowd out Friday AM: 

 

 

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GRIFTERS

Trump Is Making Noises About a 2024 Run to Get Rich Off the ‘Rubes’: Ex-White House Official

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55 mins ago

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February 27, 2021

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President Donald Trump will be running for president for a third time in 2024, but the effort will be largely geared towards personal enrichment, a former official explained on Saturday.

MSNBC’s Alex Witt interviewed Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s communications director in 2017.

“Is he going to run in 2024 or is this just a great excuse to fundraise?” Witt asked.

“I think it’s both,” Scaramucci replied. “I think he’s going to run in 2024, this is the most money he’s ever made — just imagine making $300 million off of these rubes that he’s coning after the election with his big lie. So he’ll run again in 2024.”

“Will he go to the finish line? Maybe not,” he continued. “There are 10 or 12 Republicans that see themselves as a future president. They’re going to try to find ways to undermine him, obviously Governor Nikki Haley already started that process, so I don’t know if he gets to the finish line, but why would he not run and raise money off the rubes that he’s raising money from?”

“Right, but if he runs, do you really think he doesn’t get the nomination?” Witt asked. “Today he would, there’s no doubt today he would get it.”

“I think it could get interrupted by the potential criminal investigations that are going on and the potential indictments, so if he runs and there are no indictments and I think he has a clear path to that nomination, and that’s why Sen. McConnell said ‘Of course I’m going to support him’ — which is even more levels of hypocrisy, but yes, he runs, he wins the nomination,” Scaramucci replied. “There is risk here, though, because of his potential tax fraud case and other cases — even the D.C. case related to the insurrection is a potential speed bump to him getting that nomination.”

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Scaramucci

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READ THE ROOM

McCarthy Tries to Attack Dems for Passing Survival Checks Late at Night – It Does Not End Well

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5 hours ago

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February 27, 2021

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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News on Friday to complain about a late-night vote to pass the next round of coronavirus stimulus.

McCarthy posted a clip of his appearance with a message attacking Democrats.

“Democrats just scheduled a vote for 2am tonight,” he complained. “They are so embarrassed by all the non-COVID waste in their bill that they are jamming it through in the dead of night.”

White House chief of staff Ron Klain responded to McCarthy’s complaints on Twitter.

“Democrats working late into the night to get you $1400 rescue checks; Republicans lining up to vote no,” he posted.

Polling shows Klain’s argument is resonating with voters — even Republicans.

“While Republicans in Congress have balked at the overall price tag for Biden’s proposed package, new Morning Consult/Politico pollingshows that the public — including Republican voters — overwhelmingly supports the legislation,” Morning Consult posted on Wednesday. “In the poll, which was conducted Feb. 19-22 among 2,013 registered voters and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points, 76 percent said they back the stimulus package, including 52 percent who said they ‘strongly’ support the bill. Only 17 percent of voters said they oppose it.”

“While Republicans offered the lowest amount of support, more than half of GOP voters still back the stimulus package at 60 percent. Thirty percent said they somewhat or strongly oppose the package,” the polling company noted.

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OPINION

Donald Trump Jr. Bombs at CPAC – and Gets Scorched for Lying That ‘Radical’ Dems Have ‘Banned the Muppets’ From TV

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20 hours ago

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February 26, 2021

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If Donald Trump, Jr. was hoping to get support for a political run he did not receive it at Friday’s Conservative Political Action Conference. The son of the former president was the last speaker of the day, but had to address a room with more empty chairs than he probably expected. There was no attempt to be “socially distant” at CPAC, and it was definitely not “standing room only.”

The conservative crowd did not seem terribly impressed or thrilled with Trump Jr.’s remarks. At one point, when he compared CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter (who he called Brian Slettler) to “Mr. Potato Head,” claiming that everyone makes that comparison (almost no one makes that comparison, except for this guy and a Fox News host), he got enough pushback that he had to try to defend his ugly attack.

Jr. also tried to pull off jokes like, “Liz Cheney is less popular than her father is at a quail hunt,” referring to the former vice president accidentally shooting an acquaintance in the face – in 2006, 15 years ago. There likely were attendees in the room who literally were too young to know what he was talking about. When some groaned he declared, “fact check: true.”

Trump Jr.’s speech was his usual mix of lies, half-truths, and self-victimization, accentuated with a big lie about something incredibly irrelevant: “The Muppets” (no offense meant to any Muppets.)

“This month, this month alone, they’ve banned The Muppets,” Trump Jr. lied, blaming “the radical left” for the cancellation that did not happen.

“Right. I mean, if there’s things that you thought were sort of above cancellation, you would be wrong. There is nothing, the radical left won’t cancel. ”

He was probably referring to Disney +, where almost every Muppet episode can now be seen. Entertainment Weekly reports that two episodes are missing, one because Disney could not secure the rights to the music in an episode, and one because the guest star of that episode is now a convicted sex offender and was “found guilty of possessing child pornography.”

BBC News adds that Disney has added a content warning to the beginning of some episodes over “negative stereotypes.”

That’s not cancelling The Muppets, although Trump’s father has made clear he doesn’t like warning labels on his content either.

Watch:

A few responses:

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