While campaigning last year, Donald Trump promised to repeal Obamacare, begin building a border wall and deport immigrant criminals on “day one” as president. On his actual first full day in office, however, President Trump reportedly had a more pressing matter: talking to the acting head of the National Park Service about a retweet that made him upset.
According to a new Washington Post report, NPS director Michael Reynolds was connected to President Trump Saturday morning after being told to call the White House. The president, it seems, was still mad about a tweet from the official NPS account comparing his inauguration day crowd sizes to President Obama’s in 2009.
On Friday, the entire NPS was temporarily banned from tweeting after the incident, but Trump allegedly “expressed anger” to Reynolds about it the next morning.
The Post reports that Trump also ordered Reynolds to “produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the National Mall”—evidence to support his (repeated, unproven) claim that his inauguration day crowd was bigger than reported. From The Washington Post:
The Park Service does not release crowd estimates. Experts, however, have estimated that the 2017 turnout was no more than a third the size of Obama’s eight years earlier.
Reynolds was taken aback by Trump’s request, but did secure some additional aerial photographs and forwarded them to the White House through normal channels in the Interior Department, the sources said. The photos, however, did not prove Trump’s contention that the crowd size was upwards of 1 million.
Previously, The New York Times reported that Trump grew “increasingly angry” over the tweet on Friday, but the full extent of his psychic injury wasn’t clear. If the Post’s sources are correct, the message bothered him so much that one of his first acts as president was a phone call about his hurt feelings.