White House chief of staff Reince Priebus Sunday blasted what he described as the media’s “obsession” with undermining President Trump.
“The point is not the crowd size, the point is the attacks and the attempts to delegitimize this president,” Priebus said on “Fox News Sunday” during a heated discussion about whether reporters fairly portrayed the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration. “There’s an obssession by the media to delegitimize this president, and we are not going to sit back and let that happen.”
A number of side-by-side photographs of the National Mall during former President Obama’s first inauguration and the same area during Trump’s inauguration showed that Trump drew thinner crowds on Friday.
Priebus said the pictures being used did not compare “apples to apples” and were therefore a misleading depiction of the audience at the swearing-in ceremony. He argued the crowds had actually stretched back to the Washington Monument, a fact some observers have disputed.
The chief of staff also slammed a reporter for tweeting that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office on Trump’s first day.
“It was completely false,” Priebus said of the report.
The journalist in question quickly apologized and attempted to correct the record, but the Trump team was clearly angry. Trump himself cited the incident when attacking the media at CIA headquarters on Saturday.
