This is what Trump voters said when asked to compare his inauguration crowd with Obama’s
This is what Trump voters said when asked to compare his inauguration crowd with Obama’s
On the first full day of the
Trump administration, White House press secretary Sean Spicer
admonished the news media for reporting that the crowd that witnessed Trump’s inauguration was smaller than other recent inauguration crowds, claiming,
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
What made this attempt by a Trump staffer to spread misinformation particularly egregious was the abundance of clear photographic evidence proving Spicer’s statements false. So how far are Trump supporters willing to go to accept his administration’s argument?
A significant portion of Trump supporters were willing to go quite far.
Here’s how we did our research
On Sunday and Monday, we surveyed 1,388 American adults. We showed half of them a crowd picture from each inauguration (see below) and asked which was from Trump’s inauguration and which was from Obama’s.
If the past is any guide, we would expect that Trump supporters would be more likely to claim that the picture with the larger crowd was the one from Trump’s inauguration, as doing so would express and reinforce their support for him. Further, as some respondents had never seen these photos, uncertainty regarding the answer would likely lead them to choose the photograph that would be most in line with their partisan loyalties.
For the other half, we asked a very simple question with one clearly correct answer: “Which photo has more people?” Some of these people probably understood that the image on the left was from Trump’s inauguration and that the image on the right was from Obama’s, but admitting that there were more people in the image on the right would mean they were acknowledging that more people attended Obama’s inauguration.
Would some people be willing to make a clearly false statement when looking directly at photographic evidence — simply to support the Trump administration’s claims?
Yes.
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