What Was One of Trump’s First Acts on His First Full Day in Office? Call National Park Service to Verify His Claims on Crowd Size.

Trump Ordered the Director to Produce More Photos of His Inauguration

Saturday morning, less than 24 hours after being sworn in to office at the nation’s 45th president, Donald Trump ordered the head of the National Park Service to call him. In a telephone call that day, Trump ordered acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds to “to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall,” The Washington Post reports, citing three people with knowledge of the conversation.

“The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average,” the Post notes.

“Reynolds was taken aback by Trump’s request, but he did secure some additional aerial photographs and forwarded them to the White House through normal channels in the Interior Department, the people who notified The Post said. The photos, however, did not prove Trump’s contention that the crowd size was upward of 1 million.”

Reynolds was also subjected to the new president’s anger “over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.”

Stunningly, that “prompted an ‘urgent directive’ to Interior employees that they ‘shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice,'” the Post reports. The shut down was lifted later that day, but several federal agencies have placed similr and more far-reaching bans on public communications since.

Trump that very same day would visit the CIA and address employees while standing before their revered wall of stars honoring those who gave their lives in service to their country. He told them, “We caught” the media in “a lie,” referring to reports of his crowd size. “We caught them in a beauty,” he falsely claimed, insisting 1 to 1.5 million people were present to watch him become president.

Five days after the inauguration, Trump gave his first interview to David Muir of ABC News. Here’s how he ended it: claiming he had a huge crowd, when in reality Barack Obama’s was three times larger.

Trump is still, one week later, obsessed with his crowd size and now, his lie that 3-5 million people voted in the election “illegally,” and not one of those votes was for him.

UPDATE:
MSNBC’s Steve Benen writes of Trump’s contacting the director of the National Park Service, “the president didn’t believe reality, he sought additional evidence, he considered the new information, and he then decided to reject reality once more because it made him feel better about himself.”

But perhaps most important is the fact that the president personally pressured a federal agency to tell him what he wanted to hear, facts be damned. We need to know whether Trump intends to keep doing this with other agencies.

If the unemployment rate gets worse, will the president personally call the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to ask for “alternative facts”? What about the intelligence agencies investigating Russia’s espionage operations to help put him in office?

If Trump wants political enemies to face criminal charges, how many calls does he intend to make to Justice Department prosecutors? If Trump wants to go to war, how many phone calls does he intend to make to the CIA?

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