So, how did you like President Trump's first few days? Pretty awesome, right?

From Crowdgate to "alternative facts" to Betsy DeVos' semi-literate tweets, could it possibly have gone any worse?

PHIL TORRES

It’s never false to declare that “a lot is happening in the world.” But the last few days — since Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States — have seen a phantasmagoria of major developments that shocked and awed people around the world. Since part of Trump’s strategy is to overwhelm the media with scandals, thereby establishing a false norm that makes nothing look scandalous, it’s worth pausing to reflect on how catastrophic Trump’s brief presidency has been so far.

Before the inauguration, Trump repeatedly boasted that his crowds would be exceptionally large. In his words, we should expect an “unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.” Then came the 20th of January — along with notably sparse crowds scattered across the Washington Mall. By the afternoon, images comparing Trump’s inauguration with Barack Obama’s in 2009 were circulating on social media.

Then, on Saturday, Trump gave a speech at CIA headquarters in which he complained about the media coverage of the previous day’s crowd sizes. Trump said, in typical rambling fashion, “I’m like, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people.” In fact, there were probably about 200,000 to 250,000 people in attendance, which is consistent with official Washington Metro figures indicating that 193,000 trips were taken by 11 a.m. That is “significantly fewer than the past two inaugurations and slightly fewer than President George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2005.”

Not satisfied with the media continuing to report verifiable facts, the new White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave an angry and combative lecture to the media from the press briefing room — without taking any questions. According to Spicer, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” But of course an elementary principle of epistemology is that merely saying something is true doesn’t actually make it true. (A subtle point, I know.)

Spicer then proceeded to make several more demonstrably false claims. For example, he asserted that this was “the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall, and that these “had the effect of highlighting areas people were not standing whereas in years past the grass eliminated this visual.” Sure enough, they did highlight huge areas with no onlookers. But as CNN notes, “In fact, coverings were used for Obama’s second inauguration in 2013.”

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http://www.salon.com/2017/01/23/so-how-did-you-like-president-trumps-first-few-days-pretty-awesome-right/