On Saturday, an extremely agitated White House press secretary kicked off his relationship with the reporters who make up the DC press corps by shouting lies at them for five minutes and then storming from the room without taking questions. The topic du jour: How many people attended the inauguration of  President Donald Trump. According to Sean Spicer, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” According to objective reality, which despite everything still actually matters, you’d have to be a fucking idiot to believe Sean Spicer.

Here is a picture of the inauguration crowd last week alongside a picture of the inauguration crowd in 2009:

(Source)

From this photograph we can conclude either that everyone at Obama’s inauguration for some reason decided to stand on the right-hand side of the National Mall, or that there were significantly fewer people at President Trump’s inauguration than there were in 2009.

Spicer then launched into a rapid-fire succession of little lies to support this big lie, which you can read about on (in?) Politico if you’re interested. To me the picture above says more than enough, and the extra-infuriating thing about this lie is that inauguration crowd size is meaningless. Who cares how many people showed up to watch your speech? It does not necessarily have any correlation to your popularity as president. Let me try playing the role of a character I will call “Honest Sean Spicer:”

Honest Sean: Hello guys. Wow, it’s an honor to be standing here as the new White House press secretary and about to have my first interaction with all of you, the White House press corps. I know some of you have been pointing out that the crowd at President Trump’s inauguration was smaller than the crowd at President Obama’s inauguration. Keep in mind that getting to DC is not necessarily as cheap or as simple for Trump voters, who tend to live farther from the coasts, as it is for Democratic voters. When Obama was inaugurated, getting here for many of his supporters was as simple as taking a short $20 bus ride. For many Trump supporters, coming to the inauguration meant buying a plane ticket and securing a hotel room – both things that are not only pricey, but in limited supply. So if the crowd for President Trump was a little smaller, that’s only natural. Anyway, great chatting with you guys. I’m sure we are going to have a great working relationship over the next four years.

Wow! That was a very reasonable point for Honest Sean Spicer to make, and also a very easy one. So why is the new White House press secretary introducing himself to the White House press pool by telling them a lie that they can easily disprove just by having at least one working eyeball among them?

We could also ask why Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, or “Baghdad Bob” as he was lovingly known in 2003, went on television each day to insist that the American forces were on the verge of defeat even as bombs were raining down around him and the sound of American gunfire could be heard in the distance. There could be any number of answers, but the most likely one is that Mr. al-Sahhaf, who at the time served as Iraq’s Information Minister, was in the employ of a dictator – and dictators tend to want to hear what they want to hear, regardless of how it will be perceived by anyone else.

In  a totally unrelated note, here is a tweet that Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary to George W. Bush, published after Spicer’s disastrous tirade:

I mention that for no reason whatsoever!

Also apropos of nothing, a 2011 Time article about Muammar Gaddafi explored the psychology of dictators, noting that “dictators not only lie to others as a matter of course but also lie to themselves.” Does Trump actually believe the lies he tells? I don’t know, but my hunch is that the answer is a mix of yes and no. In certain cases, however, like with the inauguration crowd size, someone should have been in a position to tell him the truth.

But it turns out that not having such a person is another characteristic of a dictator. The Time article continues: “Most non-dictatorial leaders employ subordinates who are empowered to question them. Dictators arrange their lives so that no one can play this role.” Please somebody tell me the name of someone who is empowered to push back against Trump. Kellyanne Conway? Do we have any evidence that she has ever done it, other than by fruitlessly shouting at him to “stay on the issues” during campaign rallies?

Now for a long quote from the article:

Dictators also lose their ability to see themselves and their relationships to others realistically. In a 2003 paper in the journal Psychological Review, three researchers led by Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, looked at how elevated power changes the psychological makeup of those who have it. They found that powerful people become more willing to take credit for accomplishments they didn’t achieve. They also begin to see the world around them in “more automatic, simplistic ways.”

So: Lying to others as a matter of course; not allowing for people to question them; and lacking the ability to see themselves and their relationships to others realistically, with simplistic views of the world. Does this sound like to you like anybody we might have recently made the most powerful man on earth?

In an interview given to Abu Dhabi TV after he had escaped Iraq, Baghdad Bob said that he was merely “a professional doing his job.” I’m sure Sean Spicer would say the same thing.