There is more here than meets the eye. Suddenly Steven Cheung is taking an active role in the gaslighting that usually falls to Katherine Leavitt. Was she reluctant to go on record reporting these idiotic attendance numbers at Trump’s birthday parade, that Cheung whipped out? (250,000 — and likely to be 2.5 million by Tuesday, quips Ron Filipkowski.) That would be bad enough, but it doesn’t stop there. Now Cheung is reporting his version of the No Kings In America protests and it is also the dead opposite of the truth.
80,000 in San Diego didn’t feel like a failure…
— Tucker Carlson translated (IFB ASAP)🐀 (@TimCJudd) June 15, 2025
And San Diego was far and away not the only place where there was incredible turnout. Unlikely places like Dallas and Salt Lake City also saw unexpected crowds. So what is this guy doing?
Eight million is a number to start with. Let’s be generous and say that Trump had 8,000 people at his birthday parade. There’s a lot of zeros worth of difference there. I get it that Oddjob is concerned, this is a concerning issue. But just lying about it, baldfaced, is supposed to accomplish what exactly?
They haven’t seen this yet😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/pkFKdfrQnd
— Anwar Saddat (@AnuarSaddat) June 15, 2025
Fox News says “millions” and Cheung says “miniscule.” They can’t both be right. Trumpty had visions of something that Kim Jong-Un could be envious of (top photo) and you see what he got (bottom photo.) I have to admit, even I was surprised at the sparse crowd there for Trump’s birthday. I remember the one time in my life that I had to print a retraction on this site. It was a dispute over a picture of people coming to celebrate 4th of July with Trump. At first, attendance was meager and those were the photos I published here (and from good sources, like Mother Jones.) Then the White House issued a photo which showed picnickers jam packed along the Potomac.
There was then a scuffle on social media as to whether that picture was fake or not and I said it was fake. So did a lot of other outlets, hence the scuffle. Snopes, a few hours later, verified it was real. So I had to print a retraction. And I’m always happy to print a retraction when I’m wrong, but it won’t be necessary in this case. What you have seen here, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the New York Times — everybody is in agreement that Trumpty’s birthday parade was a washout — even without the rain. He would have been better if the rains had come, it would have given him a graceful excuse for the failure of the event.
But even Mother Nature hates Trump enough, apparently, to where she held off on the rains so his birthday vanity project could flop on its own. But back to Oddjob, should we send him copies of these photos?
And again, I call your attention to the fact that for the demonstrations to be what they were in Boise, Tampa, St. Louis and Dallas, in particular, is stunning. Certainly we expected what we saw in San Diego, Los Angeles, New York and other places. But for red states and deep red states, like Idaho and Missouri and Texas, to show a turnout like this yesterday is simply stunning.
I intend to monitor Oddjob’s posts in the near future. It’s clear that something is going on here. The better part of valor would have been simply for him and everybody concerned at the White House to say nothing. Just let it pass. But clearly, there is some need to do revisionist history in real time, to memory hole what just took place and go on record claiming that something else happened. So what’s going on?
My best speculation is that Trump is freaking out and so people around him are lying to him to soothe him. That becomes a Catch-22 really fast, however, when every media outlet in the country and even abroad, is carrying the same footage of the same event. Are they all part of a Deep State conspiracy? Even the Hindustan Times, Al-Jazeera, BBC, the lot of them?
The only reason to placate Trump is if he feels he’s losing his grip. And well he should. Saturday was a disaster for him. His vanity project parade did not pan out how he wanted and the counter-programming of the No Kings In America protests were massively supported.
The message sent was clear. We all got it. And Steven Cheung can mop up after the elephants all he wants with a different version of reality, but the parade is over, both figuratively and literally, and we saw what we saw.
TACO MAN!!!!!!!
To paraphrase Jesus…hell…why not? The Gospels, inspired they may be, are a collection, at best, of paraphrase. Live by the TV…die by the TV.
They still haven’t learned.
Lying about reality doesn’t CHANGE reality.
I think he turned the numbers around!!
I wonder: does Oddjob have family? Does he go home at night and face difficult questions from his offspring? Questions like “Why did you lie today Daddy?” or “Didn’t you see the news?” or “Does Mr Trump make you say stupid things?”