White House press secretary Sean Spicer turned heads on Saturday evening when he called reporters to the briefing room and read from a written statement: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.” Spicer drew intense criticism because widely-circulated photos showed that the “in-person” audience for Donald Trump’s inauguration was much smaller than it was for Barack Obama’s first inauguration.
Spicer cited figures about the number of people present in person to bolster his claim:
At his first official White House press briefing on Monday, Spicer acknowledged that the figures he cited for Metro ridership did not comport with those of D.C. officials. But he didn’t back down from his most controversial claim that this was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.”
Spicer said he always meant to claim that the “total audience” watching last Friday’s presidential inauguration was the largest ever—including in-person participants on the National Mall and those watching on television and the internet around the world.
“I don’t know how you can interpret it differently. That’s literally what I said. ‘To witness it in person and around the globe.’ Total audience, yes,” Spicer told THE WEEKLY STANDARD at his press briefing.
Why it took Spicer two days to make this clarification wasn’t clear. His original statement was widely interpreted as referring to both the “in-person” audience as well as the audience around the globe (because the word both means “the one as well as the other”.) If this was a simple grammatical error, Spicer or a White House aide could have easily corrected it. Instead, in a Meet the Press interview Sunday, Kellyanne Conway simply claimed that Spicer was relying on “alternative facts.”
