In his big speech to CPAC this afternoon, President Donald Trump complained again about the media coverage of his inauguration crowd size a little over two years ago.
Trump first railed against the Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel for a misleading December 2017 tweet about the size of the crowd at one of his rallies. Weigel took down the tweet, but the President tore into him and said he should be fired:
He blasted Weigel today for a bit––”if that were a conservative, he would’ve been fired on the spot”––before going even further back to complain about media coverage of his inauguration crowd size.
Yes, really:
“I watched one of the evening shows that are ridiculous how horrible they are, how mean, how horrible. I watched it by mistake, and they showed… from the White House all the way down, they showed there were people––nobody’s ever seen it. The capital down to the Washington Monument, but I saw pictures that there were no people. Those pictures were taken hours before, right? They always mention crowd sizes. ‘He talks about crowd sizes.’ So I’m constantly bugging Mercedes whenever we had a slow moment. I say, Mercedes and Sarah, show them the pictures. Show them and compare them with what they put on television. Those pictures were taken hours before. And remember this also, not that Obama would do this, but we had fencing all the
way down to the Washington Monument, and it was raining. And it was wet and the grass was wet. And women and men… they had to walk all the way down, they had to walk with high heels in many cases. They had to walk all the way down to the Washington Monument and then back!”
Sean Spicer‘s 2017 briefing room debut, you’ll remember, involved him railing against the media coverage of the inauguration crowd size at length. He was roundly lambasted for that briefing.
You can watch above, via C-SPAN.
Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Weigel “took down the tweet after Trump initially tweeted about it.” Weigel took down the tweet before the president tweeted about it.
[image via screengrab]