when the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, made the easily refutable claim that Trump’s inauguration crowd had been larger than Obama’s, and was, in fact, the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.” (In a possible homage to Trump’s punctuation skills, Spicer said “period” in the middle of a sentence.) Later that week, Kellyanne Conway, formerly Dan Quayle’s pollster and now counselor to Trump, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to defend Spicer’s statement as an example of what she called “alternative facts.”
