politics

Trump says he attracted the "largest ever inauguration audience". He didn't.

If there’s one thing the Trump administration is positively sure about, it’s that the truth absolutely should never get in the way of a good story. And why should it? The truth never got us anywhere.

Facts? In the bin. Evidence? I never really liked it all that much anyway.

Trump’s dislike of the truth isn’t even his own fault. Do you remember faking a sickie back at school and lying so consistently about how sick you really, truly were, that you almost started believing it yourself?

Exaggeration is like a disease, and its clutches have well and truly clawed the new US President and his team. It’s infectious.

This time, Trump is sure the media is lying. (Beware! Fake news!)

His inauguration, they said, didn’t attract much of a crowd. He told the CIA on Saturday: “I get up this morning and I turn on one of the networks and they showed an empty field.

Woohoo! Image: Getty.
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"I said, 'Wait wait wait'. I made a speech. I looked out, the field looked like it was full of a million, a million and a half people. They showed a field where there was practically nobody standing there. And they said, 'Donald Trump did not draw well'.

"It looked like a million and a half people and it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. This network said we drew 250,000 people. Now that's not bad, but it's a lie."

Didn't you hear the guy? One and a half million, not a quarter of a million. Easy mistake, perhaps the networks misheard?

Later, Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer went even further, saying it was "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe".

I mean, sure, these photos have been popping up all over social media:

And sure, the ABC reported the easiest way to measure the size of the inauguration was crunching how many people were on public transport. And sure, they did find that as of 11am on Friday, 193,000 trips had been taken via the Washington Metro system, compared to the same time eight years ago where there had been 513,000 trips.

But didn't we just say the truth is irrelevant?

All this kerfuffle is really just that, anyway: Kerfuffle. Because more importantly, Mr. President, much like Karen from Mean Girls (do you think they know each other?) has special powers with the rain. (Post continues after gallery.)

"It was almost raining," he told the CIA about the rain threatening to come down before his speech.

"The rain should have scared them away but God looked down and said, we're not going to let it rain on your speech! When I first started speaking I was hit with a couple of drops... and then I finished and it began to pour."

Perhaps we should employ him to field off the rain during the cricket season then, too? And the Australian Open?