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 might be reason to block his appointment. 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. “You’re going to see more of this,” Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman for California, told CNN’s State of the Union. Some of Trump’s most loyal supporters in Washington defended the president’s unusual remarks. 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. Only 10 days earlier, Trump had personally likened the US intelligence establishment to Nazi Germany. 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”. Hope against hypocrisy as Trump joins the swamp GuardianĪsked 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.” 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. Anything unfavourable he will call a lie.” Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, also echoed Trump’s false claims in interviews on Sunday.Īdam Schiff, a Democratic congressman from California, said: “If Trump can’t handle the press on crowd size, just wait until they report on the economy, budget and healthcare. 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. “Trump should be ashamed of himself,” Brennan said in a statement. John Brennan, the outgoing CIA director, said Trump’s remarks were a “despicable display of self-aggrandisement” that left him “deeply saddened and angered”. 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”. Trump was earlier sharply criticised for delivering a campaign-style speech in front of a memorial to fallen CIA officers. Trump press secretary Sean Spicer claims media ‘dishonest’ in inaugural coverage Guardian “Why didn’t these people vote?”Ī later post to Trump’s account said that he recognised the right of people to demonstrate. “Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election,” he said on Twitter. The Washington Metro system said 1,001,616 trips were taken on Saturday, compared with about 570,000 on Friday.īut the president on Sunday tried to play down the significance of the demonstrations. The total was far greater than had been anticipated and easily exceeded the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd the day before. Hundreds of thousands more protested in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston and in capitals across the world, including London. Demonstrators targeted Trump, who is accused of sexually harassing and assaulting more than a dozen women and was recorded boasting about groping women by the crotch.Īs many as a million people were estimated to have flooded the streets of Washington DC for the day’s main march. Their remarks followed an estimated 2.6 million people in cities across the US attending protests in the form of women’s marches. ![]() ![]() 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. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.” “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period,” said Spicer, in one of several statements contradicted by photographs and transit data. 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.” Rattled by the country’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.
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