The opening act of the circus previewed everything thatwas to come
by digby
We’re going to look back on this and laugh reufully wondering how it was we survived. If we survive:
So many outbursts later, it can sometimes be hard to remember way back to the First Presidential Tantrum, when Donald Trump was annoyed that his inauguration crowd had far fewer people than Barack Obama’s, and turned then-press secretary Sean Spicer into a punch line in the process.
As it turns out, Spicer’s humiliation was even more complex behind the scenes. According to new documents obtained by The Guardian, Spicer was forced to call the National Park Service repeatedly on January 21, the day after the inauguration, to ask for more flattering photographs of the crowd on the mall. A government photographer did, indeed, crop the photos to eliminate much of the empty space, though The Guardian says that it is not clear whether these photos were actually published.
The new details, which were not published in the final investigative report of the crowd-size kerfuffle last June, suggest that the photographer, whose name was redacted from the report, was contacted by an unidentified official who asked for “any photographs that showed the inauguration crowd sizes.” He was reportedly asked to edit some more of his photos and submit them again.
“He said he edited the inauguration photographs to make them look more symmetrical by cropping out the sky and cropping out the bottom where the crowd ended,” the investigators said. “He said he did so to show that there had been more of a crowd.”
It was obvious from that first day that it was going to be a shitshow. And it has succeeded beyond our expectations.
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