Senior White House
aide Kellyanne Conway appears on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and
speaks to host Chuck Todd about a briefing the new press secretary,
Sean Spicer, held earlier in the weekend. Spicer claimed Donald
Trump’s inauguration had attracted record numbers of spectators.
Conway denied the statements were a lie, instead branding them
‘alternative facts’
Trump's
team defends 'alternative facts' after widespread protests
President
and advisers push falsehoods about inauguration attendance
Secretary of state
pick backed by key Republican senators
Jon Swaine
@jonswaine
Monday 23 January
2017 07.30 GMT
Donald Trump began
his first full week as US president firmly on the defensive, after
millions of Americans took to the streets to protest against his
election and the White House came under fire for brazenly lying to
the public.
Rattled by the
nation’s biggest political demonstrations since the Vietnam war,
Trump and his aides spent an extraordinary first weekend in office
falsely claiming that record numbers of people had attended his
swearing-in on Friday.
Trump’s press
secretary, Sean Spicer, used his first White House briefing to shout
at journalists about what he incorrectly termed “deliberately false
reporting” on Trump’s inauguration, declaring: “We’re going
to hold the press accountable.”
“This was the
largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period,” said
Spicer, in one of several statements contradicted by photographs and
transit data. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the
inauguration are shameful and wrong.”
Kellyanne Conway, a
senior White House aide, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday Spicer
had merely been offering “alternative facts”, a phrase that was
received with widespread astonishment.
Their remarks
followed an estimated 2.6 million people in cities across the US
attending “women’s march” protests against Trump, who is
accused of sexually harassing and assaulting more than a dozen women
and was recorded boasting about groping women by the crotch.
As many as a million
people were estimated to have flooded the streets of Washington DC
for the day’s main march. Hundreds of thousands more protested in
cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston and in
capitals across the world, including London.
The total was far
greater than had been anticipated and easily exceeded Trump’s
inauguration crowd the day before. The Washington Metro system said
1,001,616 trips were taken on Saturday, compared with about 570,000
on Friday.
But the president on
Sunday tried to play down the significance of the demonstrations.
“Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we
just had an election,” he said on Twitter. “Why didn’t these
people vote?”
A later post to
Trump’s account said that he recognised the right of people to
demonstrate.
Trump was earlier
sharply criticised for delivering a campaign-style speech in front of
a memorial to fallen CIA officers. Saying he was at “war with the
media”, Trump called accurate news reports about his inaugural
crowd being smaller than Barack Obama’s “a lie”.
John Brennan, the
outgoing CIA director, said Trump’s remarks were a “despicable
display of self-aggrandisement” that left him “deeply saddened
and angered”.
“Trump should be
ashamed of himself,” Brennan said in a statement.
While the topic of
the inauguration attendance was trivial, that Trump’s team was
immediately willing to deny reality from the world’s most powerful
office alarmed figures across the political spectrum. Reince Priebus,
Trump’s chief of staff, also echoed Trump’s false claims in
interviews on Sunday.
“If Trump can’t
handle the press on crowd size, just wait until they report on the
economy, budget and healthcare,” said Adam Schiff, a Democratic
congressman from California. “Anything unfavourable he will call a
lie.”
The weekend activity
cast doubt over speculation that Trump, who repeatedly made wildly
false statements during his campaign, would be jolted into more sober
and conventional operations by the machinery of government and the
gravity of his responsibilities.
Asked on ABC’s
This Week whether he had full confidence in Trump, John McCain, the
Republican senator and former presidential nominee, replied: “I
don’t know.”
Trump also stated
falsely during his speech at the CIA on Saturday that reports of a
feud between him and US intelligence officials had been invented by
journalists, who he said were among “the most dishonest human
beings on Earth”.
Only 10 days
earlier, Trump had personally likened the US intelligence
establishment to Nazi Germany. He also suggested US officials had
leaked to the media an explosive and unverified dossier by a former
British spy alleging links between Trump and Russia.
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Some of Trump’s
most loyal supporters in Washington defended the president’s
unusual remarks. “You’re going to see more of this,” Devin
Nunes, a Republican congressman for California, told CNN’s State of
the Union. “He was just having a good time.”
The new
administration also received a significant boost on Sunday when
McCain and Lindsey Graham, a senator for South Carolina, announced
that they would vote for the confirmation of Rex Tillerson, the
president’s nominee to be US secretary of state.
Graham and McCain,
two of Washington’s most hawkish senators on foreign policy, had
earlier suggested the relationship Tillerson cultivated with Moscow
while chief executive of the Exxon energy corporation may be reason
to block his appointment.
“Though we still
have concerns about his past dealings with the Russian government and
President Vladimir Putin, we believe that Mr Tillerson can be an
effective advocate for US interests,” the senators said in a
statement.
The Senate, which
must approve a president’s cabinet appointments, is expected this
week to approve several nominations by Trump, including Senator Jeff
Sessions as attorney general and congressman Mike Pompeoas CIA
director.
The new White House,
however, remains under pressure on several other fronts. Having
promised earlier this month that he would hand control of his
property empire to his adult children, Trump has produced no
paperwork proving that this was done. Ethics campaigners have said
the move would, in any case, not remove Trump’s myriad conflicts of
interest.
Ethics lawyers from
the Obama and George W Bush White Houses say that Trump is already
violating the US constitution by continuing to collect revenues from
foreign government officials. Trump has said he will transfer such
profits to the US Treasury.
This weekend his son
in law, Jared Kushner, was cleared by the justice department to take
an advisory role in the White House, despite widespread concerns over
the application of a federal nepotism law.
A petition on the
White House website for Trump to release his personal tax returns has
been signed by more than 200,000 people. Opinion polls show that a
majority of Americans want Trump to publish the documents, which he
withheld during the campaign in a break with decades of convention.
But aides said that
Trump would continue to withhold the returns, which are thought to
show that he paid no federal income tax in some years, and may reveal
previously undisclosed business activity.
“He’s not going
to release his tax returns,” Conway told ABC. “We litigated this
all through the election. People didn’t care.”
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