Donald Trump has been president for nearly four days, but transition officials had suggested last week that Monday should be considered the "first" working day of the famed first 100 days. That may be the view in the West Wing, but quite a bit happened over the weekend that made it clear the Trump presidency has arrived.
The president made his first appearance after the inauguration on Saturday morning with a visit to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Trump spoke to a group of gathered agents and employees—ostensibly to reassure them and the broader intelligence community of his support after tweeting a few weeks ago that intel officials may be trying to be damage him politically. "We really appreciate it what you 've done in terms of showing us something very special. And your whole group. These are really special, amazing people. Very. very few people could do the job you people do. And I want to just let you know, I am so behind you," Trump said. The president took to flogging his favorite target, the news media ("among the most dishonest human beings on Earth"), for making it seem like there was any sort of conflict at all.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who will hold his first official press briefing Monday, took the media whacking a step further a few hours later. From the White House briefing room Saturday evening, Spicer made a statement excoriating the gathered journalists and their colleagues over their coverage of the first day of Trump's presidency—and of the relative crowd size at the inauguration, in particular. (Read Jonathan Last's pithy post on this.) Spicer issued a manifesto, of sorts, for how the White House press office intends to treat the media: "There's been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable. And I'm here to tell you that it goes two ways. We're going to hold the press accountable, as well. The American people deserve better."
"A Broader Focus"
Whatever the merits or benefits of this goal to hold the press "accountable", this isn't exactly what Republican leaders on Capitol Hill want to be discussing on the first weekend of unified GOP government. The Senate Democrats' slow-walking the confirmation of Trump's national security appointments, the future of the health-care system after the repeal of Obamacare, the coming Supreme Court appointment battle—if not for a Washington-wide debate about crowd sizes, President Trump's first days might have been a chance to lay out the beginning of the Republican agenda. To be fair, Spicer mentioned a few of these issues (the delayed confirmation of CIA director Mike Pompeo chief among them) and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell attempted to widen the discussion in his Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace.
But a cursory look at what led off the Sunday political shows demonstrates that Trump's own concerns are driving the conversation in the GOP's Washington. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Meet the Press coined a new newspeak phrase in her defense of the crowd-size focus with host Chuck Todd: "alternative facts." Her interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos focused primarily on Trump's feud with outgoing CIA leadership and (you guessed it) crowd size. And the crowd-size question was the first and dominant topic in Chris Wallace's interview with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.
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01.13.2025