by Jim Acosta
“It’s a lie,” the new president said at the CIA.
“I have a running war with the media,” he continued, as if he were at a Trump rally. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, right.” To Trump, there was no difference between a hockey arena in Western Pennsylvania and the nerve center of America’s intelligence community.
“We had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I say, wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, the field was—it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody [sic] standing there.”
Not true but he went on and on.
“Honestly, it looked like a million and a half people. Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turn on—and by mistake, I get this network, and it showed an empty field. And it said we drew two hundred fifty thousand people. Now, that’s not bad, but it’s a lie. We had two hundred fifty thousand people literally around—you know, in the little bowl that we constructed. That was two hundred fifty thousand people. The rest of the twenty-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, was packed.”
I knew all too well from the campaign that Trump is obsessed with crowd size figures. He would complain at rally after rally that the photographers (as we in the industry refer to our camera operators) at his events wouldn’t turn their cameras away from the stage to show the thousands of people on hand for his speeches. He would needle reporters if they dared report on any empty seats in their news stories. Crowd size reporting, to Trump, was as important as or more important than whatever a journalist said about the content of his speeches. Call him out on his rhetoric? No big deal. Call his crowd small? Yuge deal.
Resurrecting all this during the CIA visit was particularly troubling. With the public split over its new president, Trump was doubling down on his attacks on the news media at a sacred site—a spot where CIA officers are memorialized for their sacrifices to their country, for defending the same democracy that was supposed to protect a strong, free press in America. To the amazement of many in the room, and certainly to many around the world, there was some applause for Trump’s latest broadside against journalists. Like so many episodes to come in this new administration, it was at once both stunning and disturbing.
Either way, a message had been sent: This was Trump’s CIA now. He was in charge of a powerful agency that could, conceivably, be used with ill intent. It was a chilling reminder to the news media, I thought, that our liberties could potentially be in jeopardy. But Trump and his new team were far from finished in unleashing their anger on the press.
On that same day, Trump’s first full day in office, reporters at the White House were summoned to the Briefing Room for some kind of statement from the incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer. Before he was tapped as White House press secretary, Spicer was widely regarded throughout Washington as a fairly reliable and even congenial spokesman for the Republican National Committee. Nearly every reporter in the nation’s capital had Sean’s contact information stored in his or her mobile phone. Sean could be friendly. He liked to drink with reporters. And most important, he was pretty responsive. If you texted him to confirm a story, unless you were on his bad side, you’d usually receive a reply. It’s not revealing any kind of government secret that he had been a source of mine prior to the 2016 campaign.
So, it should come as no surprise that most folks in the Washington media breathed a collective sigh of relief when Spicer was selected as press secretary. Many reporters, including me, thought Trump had made a good pick. The press corps needed some kind of conduit to the president-elect, and Sean seemed like someone who understood the important role that office had to play in bridging the massive gap between Trumpworld and the press.
It was on this first day that we realized we’d all miscalculated.
Spicer’s performance that day, needless to say, was a memorable one. It was clear that we were going to a bad place when photographs of the Trump inaugural crowd flashed on the large flat-screen monitors in the Briefing Room. Spicer, like the president, lashed out at the press, accusing reporters of misstating the facts about the number of people in attendance for the inaugural. Spicer stated emphatically that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest ever.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” Spicer told reporters. He added the “around the globe” part in a blatantly dishonest way, as if the number of people watching the inauguration on TV or their devices somehow added to Trump’s crowd size. Then came another threat, this time from the press secretary.
“There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable. And I’m here to tell you that it goes two ways. We’re going to hold the press accountable, as well,” Spicer said.
After a few remarks on other topics, and without taking any questions, Spicer bolted from the room. The fact-checkers would later pan his performance. “Pants on fire!” roared PolitiFact. Spicer, it should be noted, later said his comments that day were a mistake.
I was seated in the CNN seat in the front row, right next to Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason. We looked at each other in stunned disbelief, wondering what in the world we had just witnessed. A few moments later, I reported live from the Briefing Room, as I had on so many occasions during the Obama administration. But this was a new experience. This was not how the Obama White House press briefings used to work. Not by a long shot. Yes, the Obama people could spin, BS, and equivocate, too. But this was different. Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary, had just asked the media, and the rest of the world, not to believe their own eyes; incredibly, he was asking the world to believe Trump instead.
After regaining our senses, we went to work. My producer that day, Kevin Liptak, helped me dig up some key facts disproving Spicer’s truth-challenged rant. Spicer had told reporters that white ground coverings used to protect the grass on the Mall had been installed for the first time for Trump’s inaugural, creating the impression that fewer people were on hand for the festivities. Nope. That was false. As we discovered by looking into the CNN archives, white ground coverings were, in fact, also used at Obama’s second inaugural. Spicer also said that magnetometers and fencing were deployed for the first time on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from attending. This was also false. As we would later find with other claims the White House would go on to make, Spicer’s inauguration nonsense could easily be fact-checked with, of all things, Google.
Spicer’s performance was just the first wave of truth twisting. Kellyanne Conway, during an appearance on Meet the Press the following day, coined what will likely go down as the most Trumpian term of the era as she attempted to swat away questions from Chuck Todd about Spicer’s performance.
“Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving—Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” Conway said.
But in an interview in her office, with her famous red, white, and blue inauguration outfit hanging on the wall near the table where we were sitting, Conway offered perhaps her most extensive comments to date about the controversy, explaining to me that she essentially misspoke that day.
“‘Alternative facts’ was a slip of the tongue. I rushed through ‘alternative information and additional facts,’ and it got mushed together. It was never meant to be Orwellian or to excuse lies. Everyone who still says it and uses it that way themselves are liars,” Conway said, pointing out some of the factors that impacted the crowd size, an issue she confided she disliked.
“You could see me like I shook my head. And I meant to say what I was thinking—that Spicer was relying on alternative information and additional facts. And by that he meant that there were increasingly more ways to view the
inauguration without incurring the cost of coming to DC and physically being in the crowd. We now use our phones and other personal devices. There was rain in the forecast. There were barriers put up and warnings about security and access,” she continued, acknowledging it was basically a screwup.
“I know it sounds naïve,” she said.
It reminded a lot of reporters of what Scottie Nell Hughes, a former Trump campaign surrogate and ex-CNN contributor, told National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm a few weeks after the 2016 election: facts are no longer facts.
“One thing that’s been interesting this campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts—they’re not really facts,” Hughes famously said. “There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, of facts [sic].”
This attitude aligned with what I had heard numerous times from one of my sources inside the Trump campaign, who would go on to become a helpful provider of information from inside the White House. “The truth is a moving target,” this source would sometimes say.
A disturbing theme was quickly emerging.
Looking back, this initial falsehood about crowd size barely registers in importance. Down the road, people’s lives would be much more impacted by other deceptions, with far greater consequences. Ultimately, though, this first debate over crowd size mattered then and continues to matter today, mostly because it was the first lie of the administration. Of course, Trump had lied countless times throughout the campaign, but here, on his first day in office, when he was firmly in control of the bully pulpit, we understood that he was going to use the power of the presidency to continue to subvert the truth when it suited his purposes—even if it meant picking a fight over facts that could easily be disproven. After all, you could see from photographs later released to the public that Trump’s 2017 inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama’s at each of the latter’s 2009 and 2013 celebrations. With this fiction, though, Trump was announcing that he would engineer his own reality regardless of what our eyes told us. As we learned days later, he even called the head of the National Park Service to complain about the agency’s handling of the crowd size controversy. An Obama administration official working for the Interior Department had alerted me to the phone call, but I couldn’t confirm it before the Washington Post broke the story. Given Trump’s behavior, the official was afraid to speak out publicly. I couldn’t blame him. The Guardian newspaper later revealed that a National Park Service photographer cropped out empty space in photos of Trump’s inaugural crowd, in an attempt to satisfy White House officials, including Spicer. Trump’s refusal to believe reality that day immediately set the tone for both his duplicity and the confrontations with the press that would follow.
For his part, Spicer would come to regret his handling of such a trivial issue. In his very first briefing, he had shattered his credibility. He had flat-out lied to the press, something reporters never forget. More important, Spicer fell into the Trump pattern of attacking the notion of objective truths. It was a devastating showing. Looking back on it now, Spicer’s first performance in the Briefing Room signaled that he simply wasn’t cut out for the job.
* * *
STANDING AT A LECTERN AND BRAZENLY LYING TO THE PRESS IS THE stuff of despots and dictators. Honestly, it sounded more like something that would have happened back in my dad’s native country of Cuba. I can just picture a similar headline in the Cuban state newspaper: Fidel Castro Had the Biggest Crowd Today. Que Grande! The realization was an unsettling one.
My dad was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1950 and was raised in a small town outside the capital called Santa María del Rosario. In the fall of 1962, when he was just eleven, he left Cuba. My aunt Anabel, who had fled the island before my father and grandmother, was living in Miami. Reading the newspaper headlines about hostilities escalating between Fidel Castro and the United States, she and other family members believed it was time to bring my dad and grandmother to the States. So, on September 29, 1962, my father and grandmother fled Cuba. They landed in Miami with only the proverbial clothes on their backs. Three weeks later, the Cuban Missile Crisis would bring the world the closest it’s ever been to nuclear war, forever altering relations between the United States and Cuba and making my dad’s arrival a remarkable case of lucky timing.
This story of my father’s arrival in America was a big influence on my childhood. As a boy, I was fascinated with Cuba—not just the Cuba he was raised in but the one he left behind as well. As a young journalist, I think I had a deeper appreciation for things such as freedom of speech and a free press. They remained in the background of much of my professional journey, shaping my sense of why it was so important to ask difficult, blunt questions. The hard questions have to be asked, not only because they challenge our leaders, but because we are lucky enough to live in a place that allows us to ask them.
Speaking truth to power like this came full circle for me when I traveled to Cuba with President Obama in 2016 as the United States reestablished diplomatic ties with the island nation. At a historic joint news conference featuring both Obama and Raúl Castro, I had the opportunity to question the Cuban leader about his country’s practice of jailing political prisoners. Castro was so taken aback by the question that he removed the interpreter headphones from his ears and lashed out at me. The expression on Obama’s face was priceless—like “Damn, Jim.” One of my CNN colleagues jokingly asked how I was planning my escape from the island. But in my mind, there had been no alternative but to press Castro on human rights in Cuba. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, who had brokered the diplomatic breakthrough between the United States and Cuba, was seated a couple of rows in front of me. He passed me his Black-Berry with a message letting me know he was glad I had made the effort to push the Cubans to do better.
In part because I spent so much time thinking about Cuba growing up, I understood the importance of having an actual functioning democracy that values a free press. After all, I didn’t have to look far back into the past to appreciate what the United States had done for me and my family. We have rights and freedoms in America that have been denied to the Cuban people for decades. That means we are free to question our leaders without fear of reprisal. Sure, I’m a proud Cuban American, but I don’t want America to become more like Cuba.
I thought a lot about Cuba during those first weeks of the Trump administration, about what it meant to live under a dictatorship. It was hard to imagine our institutions being weakened to that extent, but in the wake of Spicer’s press conference debacle, I was starting to worry. After all, American democracy is only as strong as the people willing to hold it accountable.
* * *
IN ADDITION TO HIS BLOSSOMING WAR ON THE MEDIA, TRUMP FOCUSED on another urgent concern during his first week in office: immigration, the issue that had catapulted him to the top tier of Republican candidates during the 2016 campaign. As I like to put it, Trump’s enemies when he came into office can be boiled down to the “three M’s”: Muslims, Mexicans, and the media.
Trump launched his campaign with what many critics say was the most overt act of racism by a politician on the national stage in a generation. At his speech at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, when he rode down that escalator and began to turn the GOP political establishment upside down, the Manhattan real estate tycoon stereotyped Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.
Most reporters can just about recite the “They’re rapists” line from memory, but Trump went further in that speech. He painted a similar caricature of Arabs and Muslims, saying that immigration from the Middle East has “got to stop fast,” a sneak preview of coming attractions.
Later in his campaign, at a rally in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Trump read from a press release issued by his campaign earlier in the day: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said to cheers from the crowd.
Tru
mp knew exactly what he was doing. He was essentially going where no decent American politician, Democrat or Republican, would ever dare go. Here was a major Republican presidential candidate telling Americans that it was just fine to listen to their prejudices and to their fears about Muslims. Tolerance would not keep them safe, Trump insisted. He would. Trump, as he so often did, was sowing the seeds of division, and, yes, hatred. Nobody thought it would ever work long term, though. He was experiencing short-term political gains with his superheated rhetoric, sure, but the gains couldn’t be sustainable. It was one of those areas where (looking back, of course) we could see we were all wrong.
On January 27, 2017, little more than two years after announcing his Muslim ban during the campaign, Trump turned his prejudice into policy, signing an executive order that barred people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. With the stroke of a presidential pen, all people hailing from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—or approximately 218 million people—were blocked from setting foot on American soil. It was another mind-boggling moment for Americans. In a nation founded on a Constitution that opposed the establishment of an official religion and where religious intolerance had been strictly forbidden by its system of justice, Trump had initiated a policy that sought to discriminate against people who worshipped Islam.
“The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law,” he stated in his executive order.
Just as demonstrators poured out into the streets following his inauguration, protesters gathered at the nation’s airports to decry Trump’s travel ban. Poorly implemented as it was, the ban caused chaos at the airports, as scores of people, many of them American citizens, arrived at terminals to await relatives already en route to the United States from the banned countries in Trump’s executive order. Grandmothers and grandchildren who had taken off with the understanding that they would be allowed into the country arrived in America in legal jeopardy. People were sobbing while waiting for loved ones who had been stopped, turned around, and sent back to their countries of origin.