Disagreement about the crowd size is literally a matter of viewpoint -- not different opinions, but different physical vantage points from where the crowd was viewed.
Photos from opposite ends of the National Mall show this quite clearly.
This is Obama's inauguration (from the New York Times), looking at the crowd from the Capitol, from behind where the president was standing. It's a huge crowd that you can see stretches all the way to the Washington Monument at the other end of the mall, more than a mile away.
This is Trump's inauguration from the same vantage point. His crowd doesn't go all the way to the Washington Monument, and has gaps in the middle.
They look pretty much the same, right? Obama's crowd was clearly larger, but it's hard to tell by how much from this viewpoint. The blank spots in Trump's crowd look small because they're at such a shallow angle.
But the fact is, Obama's crowd was so large that is literally impossible to see all it -- from this distance that many people look like so many ants.
You can see why Trump and his cronies insist that his crowd was large. It looked large from where they were standing. Obama's crowd dwarfed Trump's -- Obama's inauguration audience was literally ten times larger: 1.8 million compared to Trump's 160,000.
To see this you need to look at it from the opposite viewpoint: here's the scene from the other end of the National Mall for Obama's inauguration. The entire length of the mall -- a whole mile -- is mostly packed with people for Obama's inauguration.
And here's the scene from Trump's inauguration. There's literally nobody in Trump's crowd near the Washington Monument, while Obama's crowd is so large that it spills off the bottom.
The higher angle of this photo really shows how dense Obama's crowd was compared to Trump's, especially at the furthest reaches from the podium.
That "huge crowd" Trump saw right in front of him stretched only a few hundred yards away, with the most densely packed portion near the podium. Obama's crowd went for an entire mile, with the most densely packed portion of the crowd the furthest away the podium.
This is typical Trump (and typical Republican) behavior. He will point at some picture or reference some anecdote to "prove" his case, then he'll ignore everything else that contradicts him.
The real mystery is why the president of the free world is worried about such nonsense. There are lots of reasons why Obama's crowd was bigger: number one being that he was the first black president, and a lot of black Americans live in and near Washington DC. Clearly, many of them turned out for the historic occasion of Obama's inauguration, while they passed on the inauguration of the man who constantly dissed blacks during a presidential campaign that he ran like a KKK rally.
But that's not the only reason. Trump is really unpopular. Most people who voted for him did so unwillingly. They knew he was a liar and a crook, but they voted for him anyway because a) they thought Hillary was a bigger liar and crook, b) they found him entertaining, c) they wanted to screw over "the elites" (who Trump turned around and nominated to his cabinet), and d) he is a man, and they think only men should be president.
To see how unpopular Trump is, compare his crowd to the crowd that turned out for the women's march the next day, in protest of Trump's inauguration:
This crowd was three times bigger than Trump's inauguration crowd (many people were in the street in this photo).
To make it worse, that same day Trump went to Langley to mend fences with the CIA after rejecting daily intelligence briefings prepared by the CIA and bashing intelligence agencies over their report on Russian interference in the US election. He gave a speech in front of the the Memorial Wall dedicated to CIA personnel who died in service of their country.
But instead of remembering the fallen, Trump bragged about himself and whined about media lies, again insisting his crowd size was bigger than Obama's. Current and former CIA employees were not pleased.
The CIA conducts this kind of analysis on surveillance photos to determine what's going on in other countries all the time. They will look at these photos and they will make their own expert judgments about who is right and who is wrong.
A president cannot function without accurate intelligence. Trump rejects intelligence, dismisses facts and antagonizes the people who provide him with both.
George Bush ignored explicit intelligence warnings about Al Qaeda activities in the first nine months of his presidency. Trump has blamed Bush for 9/11.
Given all these factors, the American people should have no patience for Trump's excuses if there's another terrorist attack. Especially after we find out that it was called out in a report that Trump couldn't be bothered to read.
No comments:
Post a Comment