Trump's real war isn't with the media. It's with facts.
Trump needs to delegitimize the media because he needs to delegitimize facts.
Updated by Ezra Klein@ezraklein Jan 21, 2017, 6:56pm EST
Speaking at the CIA this afternoon, President Donald Trump said, “I have a running war with the media.”
Like much that Trump says, this isn’t quite true. His war isn’t with the media. Trump lives off media attention and delights in press coverage. His war is with facts. And it’s there that his tactical skirmishes with the press begin to make sense. Delegitimizing the media is important to Trump because delegitimizing certain facts is important to Trump.
The topic today — and trust me, it feels as strange to write this as it does to read this — is crowd size. Trump’s inaugural was sparsely attended compared with President Obama’s inaugural. We don’t have exact estimates yet, but aerial shots are clear on this point, as is secondary data, like Metro ridership and television ratings.
There is no great mystery to this. Trump lost the popular vote in the presidential election — and by a wide margin. Since the election, poll after poll has shown him to be unpopular. A lackluster response to his inauguration is precisely what you would predict in this situation. But Trump has insisted that turnout was, well, yuge. Speaking at the CIA, he said he “looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.”
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http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/21/14347952/trump-spicer-press-conference-crowd-size-inauguration
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