The very first fight Donald Trump picked with the media after being inaugurated as president was about crowd size.<\/p>\n
On Jan. 21, 2017, the day after his inauguration, Trump visited CIA headquarters as a sort of olive branch after having disparaged the intelligence community\u2019s determination that Russia had worked to aid his election. While there, Trump claimed that \u201ca million, million and a half people\u201d had been present for his speech the previous day, which was obviously false. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, gamely attempted to defend the claim without success.<\/p>\n
As he seeks to be inaugurated again next January, Trump is again making bold, indefensible claims about crowd size. During a news conference on Thursday, though, the claim was about another January speech he gave near the National Mall: the one that preceded the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n
The New York Times\u2019s Maggie Haberman questioned an assertion Trump made shortly beforehand that there was a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Trump used the question to talk about how many people came out to hear him speak that day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest crowd I\u2019ve ever spoken before was that day,\u201d Trump said. \u201cAnd I\u2019ll tell you, it\u2019s very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture of a small number of people, relatively, going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd. The biggest crowd I\u2019ve ever spoken \u2014 I\u2019ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody\u2019s spoken to crowds bigger than me. \u201d<\/p>\n
Then he went further, comparing the crowd to the one present for the March on Washington in August 1963.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours \u2014 same real estate, same everything \u2014 same number of people. If not, we had more,\u201d Trump said. \u201cAnd they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.\u201d He chuckled. \u201cBut when you look at the exact same picture and everything\u2019s the same because it was \u2014 the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to, from Lincoln to Washington, and you look at it and you look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd \u2014 we actually had more people.\u201d<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Trump is correct that there aren\u2019t many pictures of the crowd to which he spoke on Jan. 6. Or, at least, there aren\u2019t a lot of aerial pictures that show the extent of the crowd. Instead, we mostly have street-level or slightly elevated photos.<\/p>\n
Here, for example, is a video of the view that Trump might have seen when he was speaking. As with the crowd at the inauguration in 2017, the crowd looks more densely packed from ground level or a slight elevation than it actually is because of foreshortening.<\/p>\n
In this video, from a slightly higher vantage point, you can get a better sense of the spread of the crowd.<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON DC MARCH FOR TRUMP: Massive crowd of Trump Supports in Washington DC. Getting ready to March from the Ellipse to the Nation\u2019s Capitol!#MarchForTrump#MarchToSaveAmerica pic.twitter.com\/UoWlwdG3TL<\/p>\n
\u2014 John Cremeans USA (@JohnCremeansUSA) January 6, 2021<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
From a camera to the side, though \u2014 here, MSNBC\u2019s from that morning \u2014 you can see that the crowd near the stage on the Ellipse south of the White House was fairly contained.<\/p>\n
We know from the House select committee that investigated the riot at the Capitol that Trump was unhappy with the orientation of his audience that morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way that we would always try to build rallies out was long and narrow, because that made for a better picture,\u201d White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson explained to the committee in her sworn testimony. That morning, though, Trump was frustrated with \u201chow people were spread so far out,\u201d she said, and with obstructions that made photographing the crowd difficult. This was why he wanted to skip the security screening process, as she famously testified: to more rapidly fill in the area in front of the stage. Trump, she wrote in a text message, was \u201cfurious\u201d with the situation \u2014 perhaps helping to explain the former president\u2019s lingering irritation about the photos.<\/p>\n
Regardless, the part of Trump\u2019s response in which he compares his crowd to King\u2019s is flatly incorrect. Yes, King\u2019s speech did include a large crowd that occupied some of the \u201csame real estate\u201d \u2014 the space between the Washington Monument and the White House. You can see it in the photo below, from the Library of Congress.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to compare that section of the crowd to Trump\u2019s because of the different angles. You\u2019ll also notice that, on the left side of the photo from 1963, there are several buildings that are no longer present. Constructed to serve as office space during the world wars, the last buildings were removed during the Nixon administration.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t really matter. After all, you will recall that King spoke not from the Ellipse south of the White House but from the Lincoln Memorial. The distance between the Washington Monument and where Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, was about a third of a mile. The distance between the Washington Monument and where King spoke is about three-quarters of a mile, more than twice as long \u2014 and was packed with people.<\/p>\n
As can be seen in the photo below, also from the Library of Congress.<\/p>\n
The National Park Service estimates that about 250,000 people attended King\u2019s speech, not a million. There was no similar estimate offered of the crowd at Trump\u2019s speech.<\/p>\n
But Trump presented one, as soon as he began speaking that day.<\/p>\n
\u201cMedia will not show the magnitude of this crowd,\u201d he said. \u201cEven I, when I turned on today, I looked, and I saw thousands of people here. But you don\u2019t see hundreds of thousands of people behind you because they don\u2019t want to show that.\u201d<\/p>\n
What people remember from Jan. 6 isn\u2019t that there were hundreds of thousands of people at his speech, since that\u2019s an exaggeration. What they remember instead is the thousands who swarmed Capitol Hill and the nearly 1,500 (as of writing) who would ultimately face federal charges for participating in the riot.<\/p>\n
King\u2019s speech is remembered for what he said. Trump\u2019s is remembered for what it preceded.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The very first fight Donald Trump picked with the media after being inaugurated as president was about crowd size. On Jan. 21, 2017, the day after his inauguration, Trump visited CIA headquarters as a sort of olive branch after having disparaged the intelligence community\u2019s determination that Russia had worked to aid his election. While there, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7554,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}