President Donald Trump called for a Washington Post journalist to be fired Saturday over an erroneous tweet about the crowd size at one of his rallies. The reporter quickly apologized for the mix-up and had deleted the tweet, because that’s generally what you do when you make mistakes. Except when you’re Trump, who has throughout his tenure refused to back down from even the most obvious falsities.
Trump attacks reporter over already-deleted crowd size tweet
There is some irony to Trump criticizing someone for lying about crowd size.
Emily Stewart covered business and economics for Vox and wrote the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism. Before joining Vox, she worked for TheStreet.
Trump fired off a pair of tweets attacking Post reporter Dave Weigel over a “phony photo” of an empty arena ahead of his Friday rally in Pensacola, Florida. “Packed house, many people unable to get in. Demand apology & retraction from FAKE NEWS WaPo!” he wrote.
In a separate tweet, he asserted that Weigel should be fired.
Weigel quickly responded to Trump’s tweets with an apology and an acknowledgement of his error. He said he removed the tweet, which showed numerous empty seats ahead of Trump’s speech, after being alerted by the Daily Mail’s David Martosko that he’d “gotten it wrong.” He acknowledged it was a “bad tweet” from his personal account and said it was “very fair” that he be called out.
Trump in recent days has taken advantage of a handful of journalistic errors to take aim at specific reporters and outlets. On Saturday morning, he attacked CNN for making what he called a “vicious and purposeful mistake” when it was forced to correct a story about the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. He called for the network to fire “those responsible” for the mistake.
Trump has also taken aim at ABC News’s Brian Ross, who erroneously reported that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that Trump, as a candidate, had directed Flynn to make contact with the Russians during the 2016 election. On December 1, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, whom he was directed to make contact with after Trump’s election during the transition period.
ABC News initially issued a “clarification” of the story, later apologizing and suspending Ross for four weeks.
So when is Trump going to acknowledge his own crowd size lie?
There is, of course, some irony to Trump criticizing someone for lying about crowd size.
Trump insisted his inaugural crowd was the biggest in history, attended by 1.5 million people, despite clear photographic evidence that it wasn’t.
He infamously sent then-press secretary Sean Spicer to tell reporters the day after he was sworn in that photographs of the inaugural proceedings were framed to “minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” where the event took place. “That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said.
Spicer joked about the crowd size in an appearance at the Emmy Awards in September, with a wink and a nod, acknowledging that the assertion was not true. But he’s never come out and said that he was lying at the time. Neither has Trump. The New York Times over the summer put together a “definitive list” of Trump’s lies as president. The takeaway: Trump lies a lot. And unlike reporters, who make corrections when they get things wrong, the president just sticks to it.
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