Defending a series of false statements by the official White House spokesman and administration advisers suggest that invoking "alternative facts" is not untruths.
For example, the White House's Kellyanne Conway says voters didn't care about the issue of Mr. Trump's taxes. The fact is Mr. Trump was the first presidential candidate from a major party since 1976 to release no tax returns. Although during the campaign he said he would release them after what he and his lawyers said was a multiyear Internal Revenue Service audit. However, the IRS has said he could release the returns, regardless of any audit.
Mr. Sean Spicer, the press secretary, had appeared before reporters last Saturday and accused the press of misstating the crowd size at the inauguration. Mr. Spicer added, "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration--period--both in person and around the globe"...a statement that photographs clearly show to be false.
The truth is Nielsen reported Saturday that Mr. Trump's inauguration drew a broadcast audience of 30.6 million people. However, that was smaller than the 37.8 million Mr. Obama drew for his first inauguration in 2009, according to Nielsen.
Mr. Trump also took issue with news reports about the number of people who attended his inauguration, complaining that the news media used photographs of "an empty field" to make it seem as if his inauguration did not draw many people.
And he incorrectly claimed that ridership on Washington's subway system was higher than on Inauguration Day in 2013. In reality, there were 782,000 riders that year, compared with 571,000 riders this year, according to a study by The Washington Post.
In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency, designed to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago.
He also called journalists "among the most dishonest human beings on earth," and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved.
Sources: The New York Times (Jan 22, 2017) and The Wall Street Journal (Jan 23, 2017).