On Saturday night, White House press secretary Sean Spicer delivered his first news conference in the James S. Brady press briefing room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Except that he used the occasion to yell at the media and take no questions from them.
It was the most inauspicious of beginnings to what was already a deeply fraught relationship between the Trump administration and the journalists assigned to cover him. And it was a telling sign of just how much Spicer — and the rest of the White House staff — will be required to publicly address perceived grudges and slights against the sitting president of the United States.
.. He then offered explanations for the crowd size — each of which was incorrect:
1) This was the first time in history white plastic had been laid on the Mall to protect the grass. Nope!
2) This was the first time magnetometers had been used in the inauguration proceedings. Nope!
3) More people had used the Metro — D.C.’s subway — at the Trump inauguration than had used it for President Obama’s second inaugural. Nope!
.. But Spicer wasn’t done! He went on to note that “no one had numbers” about the crowd size just before offering up a detailed assessment of just how many people can fit into each section of the Mall and, therefore, why there were far more people in attendance than the media reported.
Why I Cannot Fall in Line Behind Trump
To understand why, it’s worth keeping in mind that my chief worries about Mr. Trump were never strictly ideological; they had to do with temperament and character.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t have worries based on Mr. Trump’s deviations from conservatism, a political philosophy he seems to have no real interest in or acquaintance with.
.. The more pressing concern many of us had about Mr. Trump is that he simply isn’t up to the job of being president. And much that has happened during the transition period has confirmed those concerns. One example: Last weekend Mr. Trump gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he said his administration would quickly put out its own health proposal, which would cover everyone now insured and cost much less.
One problem: There is no Trump proposal.
.. Which leads to my main worry about Mr. Trump: His chronic lack of restraint will not be confined to Twitter. His Twitter obsessions are manifestation of a deeper disorder.
.. Donald Trump is a transgressive personality. He thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage. He is a shock jock. This might be a tolerable (if culturally coarsening) trait in a reality television star; it is a dangerous one in a commander in chief.
He is unlikely to be contained by norms and customs, or even by laws and the Constitution. For Mr. Trump, nothing is sacred. The truth is malleable, instrumental, subjective. It is all about him. It is always about him.
With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift
President Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.
In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency designed to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago. He called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved.
.. he dispatched Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where he delivered an irate scolding to reporters and made a series of false statements. Mr. Spicer said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.
.. The statements from the new president and his spokesman were a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency, usually a time when the White House works to set a tone of national unity and build confidence in a new leader.
.. While he was lavish in his praise, the president focused in his 15-minute speech on his complaints about news coverage of his criticism of the nation’s spy agencies, and meandered to other topics, including the crowd size at his inauguration, his level of political support, his mental age and his intellectual heft.
.. “We caught them in a beauty,” Mr. Trump said of the news media, “and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
.. “I was heartened that the president gave a speech at C.I.A.,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. “It would have been even better if more of it had been about C.I.A.”
.. He also did not say whether he would start receiving the daily intelligence briefs that are prepared for the president.
A most dreadful inaugural address
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor, had promised that the speech would be “elegant.” This is not the adjective that came to mind as he described “American carnage.”
.. But cheer up, because the carnage will vanish if we “follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American.”
.. the checks and balances of our constitutional architecture. They are necessary because, as Madison anticipated and as the nation was reminded on Friday, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”