President Trump Personally Ordered National Park Service to Find Photo Proof for His Inauguration Crowd Claims

President Trump Personally Ordered National Park Service to Find Photo Proof for His Inauguration Crowd Claims

President Donald Trump‘s obsession with the size of his Inauguration Day crowd size runs even deeper than he first let on with his tweets and many public comments about the numbers.

National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds was personally contacted by Trump to produce additional photo proof that could back up the president’s claims of having the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” according to The Washington Post.

During a phone call that took place one day following the swearing-in ceremony, Trump summoned Reynolds to find photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall.

“The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average,” said three sources who have knowledge of the conversation.

Also during the phone call, Trump expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs were used to compare his swearing-in attendance with Barack Obama’s inaugural in 2009.

The same day he spoke with Reynolds, Trump accused news organizations of lying about the size of the inaugural crowds, during a visit to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the Post that the phone call demonstrated how Trump’s management style is to be “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”

“He’s not somebody who sits around and waits. He takes action and gets things done,” Sanders explained, adding, “That’s one of the reasons that he is president today, and Hillary Clinton isn’t.”

Days after Trump’s orders to the Park Service, he acted on another obviously sore subject — the size of his almost-3-million vote loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 popular vote –by ordering a “major” investigation into his baseless claims of alleged voter fraud in last year’s presidential election.