You know what's funny?
The press continues to be the Trump's greatest ally while THINKING they're being some sort of safeguard of liberty.
Just yesterday we were treated to crap from the press once again that had no basis in reality:
1) the flawed claim about MLK's bust being removed
2) Rachel Madcow, PhD (which stands for post hole digger), invoking the Hitler reference about Trump's inaugural speech
3) the trick of putting up pictures of the 'crowds' from two different times of day to say "Trump inaugural not as big" - more on this in a moment
4) there's another one that has literally slipped my mind - cut me some slack, I'm having my second bout in two weeks with some sort of cough/respiratory/flu illness
On top of that you had an NBC writer for SNL actually suggest a President's 10-year old son would be the home school version of Adam Lanza. And we all know damned well that same person would never have said that about Obama's kids.
The problem is that because of the Internet, these tricks are going to be exposed usually within an hour. AND YET THE PRESS STILL PULLS THIS CRAP!!!!!
And they only manage to pull it on Trump, never Obama.
You cannot as the so-called safeguard of liberty press tell LIES that you KNOW are lies and then get mad that Trump lies. It doesn't work that way in the real world. And when you as the press LIE about things that are easy to prove then people have no reason to believe what you say about any other issue - if you lied about something so knowingly as the size of the crowd then maybe you're also lying about climate change, abortion, gay rights.....and everything else.
Plus, I suspect this is the deal maker in Trump at work. Send out your press secretary to lie while you're doing something of long-term importance (you know, maybe vetting a SCOTUS nominee) and get them focused on the lie while you're doing what you want done. Do it enough times they start running stories about how many lies you've told...and then ramrod a nominee through the Senate.
How many times is Trump going to have to pull that sort of trick before the press grows a brain?
Just remember: Trump's low approval rating is still higher than the approval rating of journalism - by far. One thing that really is true about Americans is that IN GENERAL - whether left or right - people have a fundamental 'sense of fairness' - they don't like to see someone criticized for something they themselves would do. This is part of why Clinton survived impeachment: middle aged men saying "well, if a 22-year old offered my 50-year old member a hummer, I'd take it" and women saying, "well, you can take one look at Hillary and tell she doesn't do that - and a man has needs" - and knowing deep down that 90% of the boys in Congress did the same thing. So when Trump gets criticized for minutiae, it's not going to stick with anyone but the ideologues who would turn their eyes if it was their person.
I reiterate: no matter what he does, to me he will ALWAYS be "the guy whose arrogance destroyed the USFL." I'm no fan of him, either, but if the press keeps it up then he's going to succeed over their heads yet again.
FTR - I have no doubt that Obama's crowd was substantially larger than Trump's but so what? Obama's was a unique situation of the first black President and no doubt a substantial number of people of color attended that inauguration that wouldn't attend Trump's anyway. Hillary's would have been larger, too, and not just because she won the completely irrelevant 'popular vote.'