Credibility gap: Our view

The flap between the White House and the news media over how many people watched President Trump’s inauguration has almost nothing to do with crowd size and everything to do with the new president’s credibility. The sooner the White House understands what a precious commodity credibility is, and how quickly it can be squandered, the better off the president and the country will be.

During Trump's first weekend in office, two senior advisers and the president himself uttered what can only be described as untruths. Against all evidence, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer insisted that Trump's audience was larger than the one at Barack Obama's first inauguration, in 2009. White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway compounded the damage by telling NBC’s Meet the Press that Spicer's statistics were simply “alternative facts,” an Orwellian formulation that seems destined for immortality.

Worse yet, President Trump visited the Central Intelligence Agency, stood in a solemn place that honors fallen officers, and tried to palm off his own insults against the intelligence community as “a feud” cooked up by the "dishonest" news media. Trump would have done better just to look at the Biblical verse etched into a nearby CIA wall: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Trump is hardly the first president to use the news media as a convenient foil, but he might be the first to do it on his first full day in office. Presidential administrations don’t get many chances to recapture credibility once it is gone. Just ask George W. Bush or his top intelligence officials how much credibility they lost after Bush insisted the war in Iraq was necessary because of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist.

Crowd size is of far less import than WMD, but the concern about Trump administration officials is if they lie about little things, what will they do about big things, such as national security failures?

The Trump administration is just four days old; there’s time for a course correction. At Monday's press briefing, Spicer offered a heavy dose of rationale for Saturday’s comments, a complaint about negative news coverage, and a hint of an apology. His most important comment, however, was this: "Our intention's never to lie to you."

As the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, everybody's entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts. Even if they are called "alternative facts."

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

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