Even rightwing sites call out Trump administration over 'alternative facts'

Adam Gabbatt
Monday 23 January 2017 19.40 GMT

In their false claims about the size of the crowd at the inauguration on Friday, and in the introduction to common parlance of the term “alternative facts”, senior aides to Donald Trump managed to achieve the unthinkable: getting rightwing news sites to disagree with the president.

The Blaze, the Daily Caller and Fox News – generally staunch supporters – all called out Trump for his statement that “a million, million and a half people” attended his inauguration in Washington DC.

It was left to Breitbart News – whose former executive chair Steve Bannon is a senior adviser to Trump and which employs Julia Hahn, a writer linked this weekend to a White House post of her own – to defend the president. The conservative news site insisted that “it looked like the entire mall was full” on Friday and described “alternative facts” as “a harmless, and accurate, term in a legal setting”.

Trump used a speech in front of the memorial wall at CIA headquarters in Virginia on Saturday to accuse the media of lying about his crowd numbers. Later, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, repeated the claims at a rancorous press briefing. Senior aide Kellyanne Conway claimed on Sunday that the pair had presented “alternative facts”.

Rightwing news sites have stuck by Trump as he repeatedly lied on everything from poll numbers to his support for the Iraq war. But his lie about the number of people who attended his swearing-in – which was contradicted by photographs circulated on Friday and District of Columbia transit data – prompted some such outlets to call out the president.

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