President Donald Trump demanded that the acting National Park Service director produce additional photographs of crowds at his inauguration to prove his claims about attendance numbers, according to a report published Thursday by the Washington Post.
In a phone call the day after his inauguration, Trump personally ordered acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds to produce additional photographs of crowds at the ceremony, according to the report citing three anonymous sources with knowledge of the conversation.
The President thought that the photographs might prove that press had deliberately underreported crowd sizes at his inauguration.
Reynolds obtained additional aerial photographs of the ceremony for Trump, but these did not prove the President’s claims of “a million, a million and a half” attendees, according to the Washington Post.
Trump also berated Reynolds on the call about a post retweeted by the National Park Service’s official Twitter account. The original tweet, later taken down, compared the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration to Obama’s in 2009.
Reynolds would not talk about the call to the Washington Post, and National Park Service spokesman Thomas Crosson said that the agency “does not comment on internal conversations among administration officials.”
White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the Washington Post the call demonstrates that Trump is “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”
“He’s not somebody who sits around and waits. He takes action and gets things done,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons that he is president today, and Hillary Clinton isn’t.”
Trump continued to play up the crowd size at his inauguration in an interview Wednesday night, even as he groused that the media keeps “bringing it up.”
In fact, Trump and his staff have jumped at the chance to relitigate the subject at least eight times since his swearing-in.
