Trump’s continuing crowd obsession demonstrates perils of Twitter presidency

It was a castoff pro-football player who offered some wise advice to President Trump on Monday, after a first few days in office marred by squabbles over how many people attended his inauguration.

“Yo @POTUS even I know to stay away from the notifications section on twitter,” wrote former Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel, who has struggled with fame and substance abuse.

“S— will drive you crazy,” Manziel added. “Lead the country and let them hate.”

Manziel’s counsel was even more relevant Monday afternoon, after White House press secretary Sean Spicer had concluded his first press briefing of the new administration.

Near the end of the more than hourlong back-and-forth with reporters, Spicer talked in emotional and evocative terms about the frustration inside the White House over the media’s coverage of Trump. Spicer seemed to be channeling the personal frustrations of Trump himself.

“The default narrative is always negative, and it’s demoralizing,” Spicer said of the press’ approach.

Spicer made his comments when asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta why he chose to make the inauguration crowd size an issue over the weekend. Spicer appeared in the briefing room Saturday afternoon to denounce reporters’ tweets that compared the size of Trump’s crowd with Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Spicer incorrectly claimed, just as Trump himself had earlier Saturday, that the National Mall was full of people all the way from U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument. Trump’s inaugural crowd, in fact, ended several blocks short of the monument. Photographs of both years show a far bigger crowd in 2009 than for Trump’s inauguration, and crowd experts estimate Obama drew about 1.8 million people in 2009, compared with between 160,000 and 250,000 for Trump this past weekend.

Spicer also quoted inaccurate statistics about Washington subway usage for Trump’s inauguration. Numbers provided by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority showed there were far more rides for both of Obama’s inauguration ceremonies.

Additionally, as Spicer spoke Saturday, there was a massive crowd filling much of the National Mall that was there to protest Trump’s inauguration. Photos, crowd experts and metro statistics have indicated that the anti-Trump protest was attended by two to three times the number of people who had been on the mall for Trump the day before.

Thousands of demonstrators gather for the Women's March on Washington to protest President Trump. (Photo: Mary F. Calvert for Yahoo News)
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched in Washington on Saturday to protest President Trump. (Photo: Mary F. Calvert for Yahoo News)

Despite all this evidence, Spicer said that Trump had earned the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Spicer nearly shouted at the press, and then marched out.

Trump himself said earlier Saturday that the crowd looked to him like it was between 1 million and 1.5 million people.

The absurd and reality-denying statements by Trump and Spicer quickly permeated into popular culture. Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr joked about Spicer’s laughable exaggerations with reporters after his team’s game Sunday night in Orlando. The Dallas Stars of the National Hockey League, during a game with the Washington Capitals Saturday night, mocked the president by jokingly posting the attendance for the game on the Jumbotron as 1.5 million.

On Monday, the question was why? Why did the president, and Spicer, feel so strongly about crowd size, and why were they so focused on something so ultimately inconsequential when the more pressing issue was the job of running the government, which is a monumental task?

Spicer went on at length to explain himself at Monday’s press briefing, after first admitting he had offered inaccurate numbers about Metro ridership and also acknowledging that Trump’s inauguration crowd had not actually set any in-person records. He maintained, without evidence, that the inauguration set global viewership records, challenging reporters to prove that it hadn’t.

In short, Spicer said, Trump has always been second-guessed, discounted, disbelieved and laughed at.

“It’s not just about a crowd size. It’s about this constant, you know, ‘He’s not going to run.’ Then, ‘If he runs, he’s going to drop out.’ Then, ‘If he runs, he can’t win, there’s no way he can win Pennsylvania, there’s no way he can win Michigan,’” Spicer said, playing out all the ways many in the media and in politics have dismissed Trump.

“It’s just unbelievably frustrating when you’re continually told it’s not big enough, it’s not good enough, you can’t win,” Spicer said.

It was an odd complaint from the spokesman for the man who just won the presidency of the United States, and now sits in charge of the entire executive branch.

“He’s gone out there and defied the odds over and over and over again. And he keeps getting told what he can’t do by this narrative that’s out there. And he exceeds it every single time,” Spicer said.

President Trump. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
President Trump (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Spicer continued a litany of complaints about press coverage. He focused on an inaccurate Saturday report that had initially said Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. That error was quickly corrected by the reporter who had mistakenly reported it, but not before it took off on social media. Spicer also complained about inaccurate media reports on Rep. John Lewis’ claim that he had never skipped an inauguration before Trump’s, when in fact he had also skipped George W. Bush’s.

When Acosta pointed out that criticism, questions and accountability were part of the job of being president, Spicer cut in.

“No. No, look, I’ve been doing this a long time, you’ve been doing this too. I’ve never seen it like this,” Spicer said.

The press has indeed been highly critical of Trump, and many Americans believe it was heavily slanted against him during the election. Trump has in fact benefited from media hostility. Public approval of the mainstream press is at historic lows, with only about a third of the public saying they trust it. And many times when the media has gone into outrage mode over something Trump has said or done, it has created sympathy for Trump, even from people who don’t necessarily agree with him or even like him.

But even if the media’s criticism of Trump is more aggressive than it was of Obama, just about every president thinks the press is conspiring against him.

“During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare,” Thomas Jefferson complained in his second inaugural address in 1805, after being reelected to a second term.

President Jimmy Carter’s advisers wrote entire books about the way they felt they were unfairly treated by the media. George H.W. Bush’s advisers felt he never recovered from the impression created by a Newsweek cover story that that labeled their boss a “wimp” in the minds of critics. Bill Clinton of course fought with the press endlessly. George W. Bush came under enormous criticism during and after the invasion of Iraq. Obama, for all the talk of the media’s love for him, often complained about press coverage and dismissively referred to “cable chatter.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer holds the daily press briefing in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
White House press secretary Sean Spicer at Monday’s press briefing. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Spicer’s comment about press criticism reflects, in part, the fact that the noise of political chatter on cable TV and social media is now, in our current age, at a fever pitch and almost never turns off. It is deafening and nonstop.

For even the relatively anonymous citizen, or for the average journalist, social media feedback in the comments of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook can be an unhealthy distraction. And the larger someone’s platform, the more attacks they will come under in their comments section.

Every president has to deal with a volume and intensity of criticism that would make the average person tremble. The art of leadership involves listening to criticism but not being dominated by it. And the job of president requires that the occupant of the Oval Office be motivated by a set of principles and not by acclaim.

Trump is well known to watch himself on TV, and he has proved himself a voracious consumer of social media content. His antics on the first full day of his presidency, and Spicer’s comments explaining them, demonstrate the danger of having a commander in chief motivated as much by the moment-by-moment opinions of others about him as he is by anything else.

It’s not clear whether Trump is even capable of following Manziel’s advice, and of buckling down and focusing on his job rather than reading Twitter. If he can’t, the past few days may just be a small taste of the trouble that may be ahead for his presidency and the country.

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