When the tumult hit the fan

27 January 2017, 20:49 | Updated: 27 January 2017, 20:55

trump

It was a week when the word "tumultuous" was wheeled out by anyone that spoke about the new American regime.

If that word had not already existed, we would have had to invent it just to encompass what has happened so far.

 

First and foremost, the new leader seems obsessed with refuting the notion that he is in any way not the most popular person on earth, ever.

 

Every day, he has returned to the story about the numbers that came out to see his inauguration, or the numbers of votes cast in his favour at the election.

 

He seems incapable of letting anything go, no matter how trivial. He takes any slight, imagined or otherwise, and feels compelled to smash it into the ground, like a toddler who breaks his toys when he is told it is time for bed.

 

The press would have moved on from how few people showed up on the National Mall, but Trump won't let them.

 

He just keeps on lying about it and sending his harassed team out to lie about it, when anyone with functioning eyes can see the huge discrepancy in the crowds that greeted Obama and the new incumbent of the Oval Office.

 

First, he sent out a man with a shaven head who looked like he had been bricked up in his own suit.

 

Whitehouse Press Secretary Sean Spicer screamed nonsense at the assembled news corps, as though they could be cowed into agreeing with an obvious untruth by pummelling them with volume.

 

He shouted that no-one knew the numbers that were present in The Mall to see Trump sworn in and therefore you could not make a comparison with Obama's crowd for his first big day.

 

Having stated that no accurate crowd numbers could be gauged, he then claimed that Trump's numbers were "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period ".

 

They don't do irony in the new administration. Irony is for losers with small crowds.

 

He looked like the world's angriest man, but then he had probably spent the previous day being yelled at by the Don.

 

Another unhappy traveller was Trump's consigliere Kellyanne Conway, a woman that looks like she was refused a job as an extra in a vampire film because she looked too tired.

 

She wears the tiredness of a 150 year-old, but she probably doesn't get much sleep these days what with having to tend to a screaming orange baby.

 

She was sent out to brow-beat the press into believing the lies that Sean Spicer was selling.

 

In a perfect moment that encapsulated the new era, she said on American national television that Spicer and Trump were not lying about the obvious shortfall in the new President's turnout, they were simply expressing "alternative facts".

 

If that is not the phrase of the year come December, I will be astonished.

 

Actually, I will be astonished if the world makes it to December.