UPDATE: 8:15 p.m. PDT

A few people here and at Daily Sound and Fury said that Snopes verified the photograph of the crowd at the July 4th gathering as real. I just went and checked out Snopes and that is what they are saying. Here is the link if you want to read the entire article. 

Now, a few things to bear in mind.

  1. The Snopes fact check went up only two hours ago. When this piece was published nine hours ago, the best information available at the time was used.
  2. TIME Magazine reported “thousands of people braved the rain.” This was backed up by photographs from people, such as Josh Marshall, who were questioning the 3.4 million attendees figure, yesterday. Marshall was physically present. Therefore, it was not unreasonable to question how many people were actually in attendance.
  3. The web cam at the Washington Monument was shut off for a time yesterday;
  4. People were leaving in droves when the rain began to come down hard. You saw Trump speaking behind a piece of plexiglas, streaked with rivulets of rain the entire time. Point being, the weather added to the confusion about how many people were where, for how long, and at what time.
  5. Photoshopping photos and doctoring video is common place with this administration. You recall the debacle with Jim Acosta being accused of karate chopping an intern. That video was doctored. Photos of Trump’s inauguration, which Sean Spicer lied about being, “the largest inauguration crowd in history,” were falsified. Not exculpating myself here, merely saying that if the knee jerk reaction was, “what, again?” we have that reaction because we come by it honestly.

All that being said, I will go on record saying that anything that is published on this website is factual and truthful and if/when we find out to the contrary, we will always print an update or a retraction or both.

My thanks to the readers who mentioned Snopes and got me on the trail. This issue has been hotly debated on social media today, which is why Snopes settled it. Snopes is a reliable fact checking service and if you hit the link above you will see both photos of crowds and photos of empty spaces and it is not in the least bit surprising that this controversy took place, on these facts.

Thanks, friends, and keep coming back to PolitiZoom for breaking stories and up to date news.

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I have been wondering out loud for over a week now, when we might hear from the new press secretary, Stephanie Grisham. We now have heard. She is the new Minister (or should it be “Mistress”) of Propaganda in TrumpWorld. Here’s what she tweeted to the world yesterday.

Incredible is the word for this photograph, yes. I’ll stipulate to that. Of course, we have heard nothing from Grisham about Mike Pence’s recent emergency return to Washington, D.C. and we certainly have not heard any explanation of Trump’s teleprompter snafu yesterday, when he started raving about the Continental Army taking over airports that didn’t exist. Grisham doesn’t seem one for press conferences either, any more than Hucky Boo Boo was, especially towards the end.

If you check out Grisham’s Twitter feed right now, it’s all pure pro-Trump propaganda, how many jobs there are, retweets of Ivanka’s latest gushing praise of her pater — the only indications there that everything is less than grand, are tweets like these.

It’s evident that to work in “communications” at the White House, you need to be completely bereft of all journalistic standards, not to mention human decency. How do these people live with themselves? Being a liar and propagator of fraud is okay, as long as you get a paycheck for it? This is a White House where truth is not only not valued, it is assiduously avoided. The media are not “the enemy of the people.” Truth is the enemy of Donald Trump and that’s where the fight is, between the Trump/Fox propaganda machine, spinning up it’s fable and the rest of us, living in reality. This is just one more exhibit in the big fraud being perpetrated on the American people for two and a half years now.

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1 COMMENT

      • The problem is, he’s the front man for a very dangerous group of people, known as the Republican party. And they are scary.

        • No, they’re not…not now. Trump has unmasked them as a decrepit party barely held together through old, outdated resentments and money that is leaving for greener pastures. I’m firmly convinced that 2018 was just the beginning of our knocking the Reagan era Republicans aside at last.

  2. You know it’s a fake image because it was actively raining during Himself’s “speech”. (Did they release the prepared text, as they usually do?)

    Also, I hear the webcam is still down.

    • What frightens me about this is the fact that Trump and cadre are committed to creating impressions and images and not the least bit committed to anything of substance or value. This is just another rock on the pile.

    • Also, you can’t see the tracked vehicles that were parked right by that bunting-covered barricade – they’re visible in Ninayasmin’s tweet.

  4. I must say, it is easy to spot the Photoshop work done for DJT, they miss things that any relatively good eyesight would notice … things left out, new things in, it comes to haunt those that took lots of time to make a match up … his phony botched up photo for his launch, where he said lies under oath with his hand on the bible yet, for those so-called RW Christians that may have forgotten or missed it … there HAD to be pieces of at least 3-4 different president photos, taken by the same photographer and same point, Butt head in the WH and Vice Butt head, both signed the final version in gold leaf and skewered the marks that paid $500. dollars a copy way back and soon after the event … the reason the final, “shopped”, version had so many problems, IMO, is, they had to produce a copy for the handing over at the dinner at the Capitol a couple hours later, as Trump rolled it around, he complimented the photographer for such a nice job, NOT for a great photograph, but a well made, “shopped”, version …. However, it really was rank, anybody shown the mistakes could easily see the trash there, new or missing buildings, new or missing trees, blushing differences in the sky views, different scaffold problems for the TV cameras ….

    NOW THIS piece of trash comes out, at least there was not any imaginary people in the reflecting pool area like his first photo … here we have a weather chomp on the master, “shoppers” …
    If we believe for one second his version is real, we need professional help …

    Two glaring simple flags … where are all the umbrellas we all carry now, you have one or somebody else in your family does, they open up with the push of a button on the handle of a compact, folded up umbrella with all the ribs and links in a bundle, about a foot or little more in length, handle and all ….maybe about 2-1/2″ in diameter … spring loaded, to fly open in a one-handed, fully deployed
    ready to go position … all the time Trump played the blithering idiot behind his rain covered Plexiglas, it was annoyingly wet for any one without their wonderfully small, but when opened out umbrella canopies in bright colors of your choice, red is common, blues, yellows, orange, green, white and black, where the hell are they? I can’t seem to see any of them, my eyes are not what they used to be, but oh well, the only dude in a plastic bag was a newscaster with his wind blown position near the super stand for lights and cameras ….

    The other point to make, and someone that knows any different let us all know, the international understanding of these huge company fireworks producers, and you local fire Marshal’s office is, depending how high and large the bombs in the display are, there is a minimal clear area that the local fire Marshal’s team has to hold open all around the epicenter of the display … the world’s greatest display like this one was supposed to be, the radius of the clear area would be enormous, probably at least 1000 feet, making a natural hole in the crowd space about 2000 foot wide … where the hell is that? In their mad dash to please Trump, they have pushed a huge number of illegally placed people in the far zone of the mall, totally soaked in the rain without their prized mini umbrellas to shed the rain …

    What a team of putz works with/for Trump nothing based on truth or human kindness, nor even one ounce of caring for little children in cages, without their parents … his whole family is feral and should be wearing ankle monitors until their own day in court …

    • Which of the photos are they talking about? The ones with the red-carpeted platform and the dozen or so people standing on it aren’t from yesterday. It was raining while that stuff was going on, and Himself didn’t have people in formalwear with him. He was also in a bulletproof booth, which you can see clearly in the pic with the Memorial in the background, along with the tracked vehicles on each side of the bunting-draped barricade – and *those* aren’t visible in the crowd shots, either, though they should be.

    • Yes, which? Reputable news sites have said thousands of people showed up in Washington — no ways it was over three million. But if you can give me a link to something, I will check it out.

  7. Not to be TOO crude but if Stephanie is called the Mistress of Propaganda, I suspect part of her duties is what another Stephanie did with his backside with a rolled up Wall Street Journal.

  8. The part of the video they released showing Himself striding to the podium? That’s not Thursday’s event. It was raining on Thursday, not sunny.
    Talks about “fake news” from others, sends out “fake news” himself.

    • This altering of reality that Trump does with Fox News and with Hucky Boo Boo aiding and abetting him, is very disturbing. We’ve always been a nation of different opinions, but at least facts were agreed to. That’s no longer the case. And it’s pretty sobering that people feel that they can’t trust what they see with their own eyes, because it might be doctored.

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