Top Trump Advisor: Actually Crowd Size Isn’t That Important After All

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Top Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday that presidents are not judged by “the crowd sizes at their inauguration,” even as other members of Trump’s administration continued disputing media reports on the subject.

“The crowd size, it’s actually not a very animating topic to me for a very simple reason,” Conway said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“He had hundreds of thousands of people here, there’s no question,” she said. “Presidents are not judged by their likeability ratings among contemporaries or the crowd sizes at their inauguration.”

“i completely agree with that. We spent eleven hours on the air during the inauguration, barely talked about the crowd size if we brought it up at all,” George Stephanopoulos replied. “The question is, why does the President choose to talk about that at the CIA? Why does he send his press secretary out to talk about it in his first White House briefing and say things that aren’t true?”

“First of all there was rain, the downpour that was reported and I think it deterred many people from coming,” Conway said, apparently acknowledging low turnout before pivoting back to her talking points. “But there were hundreds of thousands of people here.”

She accused the media of working to “delegitimize the president,” but concluded: “I want good relationships with the press.”

On Sunday morning, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus continued to dispute crowd size at the ceremony in the face of a side-by-side comparison of photos from President Donald Trump’s inauguration and President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

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