Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer is sticking to his assertion that President Trump had the largest inauguration audience in history.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Spicer acknowledged that his assertion that Trump’s inauguration was the largest in history was misleading.
But he argued that, in terms of the “total population that watched it,” the real estate mogul garnered the most attention.
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“If you look at the statement that I actually made — and I will admit that we should have made it clearer — we should have focused on total audience size and not let people believe that we were talking about the Mall itself, I will concede that,” he told the Post.
He said, however, that the number of people who viewed Trump’s inauguration was larger, because of technologies that were not available to past presidents, like Barack Obama.
“But where has any evidence been that suggests that I’m wrong about the total population that watched it?” he added. “This isn’t a partisan thing. The bottom line is that there are platforms available today that weren’t available for Obama.”
Spicer, who is promoting a new book, “The Briefing,” came under fire just after Trump took office last year when he insisted that the real estate mogul’s inauguration audience “was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”
But photos comparing Trump’s inauguration crowd on the National Mall to that of Obama showed a noticeably sparser crowd.
Spicer resigned from his White House post last year after Trump named Anthony Scaramucci as his new communications director.