Donald Trump’s first few days as president have been overshadowed by his battle with the media over estimates of the size of the crowd that witnessed his inauguration.

Trump and his team are wrong when they said that his crowd was bigger than the turnout at either of Obama’s inaugurals. But it is rich of the media to focus on crowd sizes now as if they convey some meaning. For a year and a half, most journalists dismissed the tens of thousands of people who routinely attended Trump’s campaign rallies, even though (or perhaps because) Trump constantly bragged about them. If the media had paid more attention, perhaps more of them would have anticipated the outcome.