NY Times Corrects Rally Crowd Size Estimate After Trump Rebuke

President Donald Trump took aim at the New York Times on Wednesday over the paper’s estimate of the crowd size at his rally the night before in Tennessee.

“The Failing and Corrupt @nytimes estimated the crowd last night at ‘1000 people,’ when in fact it was many times that number – and the arena was rockin’,” he wrote on Twitter. “This is the way they demean and disparage. They are very dishonest people who don’t ‘get’ me, and never did!”

The Failing and Corrupt @nytimes estimated the crowd last night at “1000 people,” when in fact it was many times that number – and the arena was rockin’. This is the way they demean and disparage. They are very dishonest people who don’t “get” me, and never did!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018

Well, it turns out Trump was correct. The New York Times, ever in pursuit of accuracy, updated its report with a correction, based on the fire marshal’s estimate.

An earlier version of this article cited an incorrect figure for the number of people attending President Trump’s rally. While no exact figure is available, the fire marshal’s office estimated that approximately 5,500 people attended the rally, not about 1,000 people.

Times reporter Julie Davis took to Twitter to issue a mea culpa for the mistake:

President @realDonaldTrump is correct about his crowd last night. My estimate was way off, and we have corrected our story to reflect the fire marshal’s estimate of 5,500 people. When we get it wrong, we say so. https://t.co/AX2JkAMyh4 https://t.co/2LbfmkiSti

— Julie Davis (@juliehdavis) May 30, 2018

“When we get it wrong, we say so,” she wrote.

Trump’s tweet was reminiscent of 2016 campaign Trump, who obsessed over the crowds at his large rallies, and routinely blasted the media for underestimating their sizes. And we all remember his famous fixation on the crowd size at his inauguration — history’s biggest, he boasted. Though that time, he was incorrect.