With False Claims, President Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift

President Donald Trump used his first full day in office on Jan 21 to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.

In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency intended to showcase his support for the intelligence community, President Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago. He also called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved. Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements. He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when President Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.