If Donald Trump is really hoping to repair relations with the intelligence community, he sure is going about it in an odd way. On Saturday, the newly sworn-in president made his first visit to the Langley headquarters of the C.I.A., with whom he has been feuding for weeks over the agency’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential race to help him win. “There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the C.I.A. than Donald Trump,” he said, to ecstatic whooping and clapping in the original headquarters building lobby. “I am so behind you.”

But what began as an apparent attempt to mend the divide between Trump and the intelligence community quickly devolved into a bizarre, classically Trumpian spectacle: a half–stump speech, half–anti-media crusade that one official described to CBS News as “uncomfortable” and characterized as damaging to the already strained relationship. Standing in front of the agency’s Memorial Wall of heroes, which honors the C.I.A.’s dead, Trump blamed the press for inventing his feud with U.S. intelligence agencies, claimed his inauguration address drew crowds of about 1.5 million people (despite photographic evidence suggesting well less than a third this number), and engaged in a bizarre digression about his own intelligence (“I’m like, a smart person”). John Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., released a statement afterward calling Trump’s speech a “despicable display of self-aggrandizement.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer, meanwhile, billed Trump’s visit as a massive success, claiming during a press conference later Saturday that the president’s speech had elicited a five-minute standing ovation from the audience. But since the event, a number of officials and attendees have pushed back on the narrative that Trump’s visit was well received by everyone in the crowd, describing a largely lukewarm audience stacked with Trump staffers and invitees, who filled the first three rows.

One official told CBS News that much of the applause had come from the roughly 40 people who had been brought by Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee to lead the spy agency. According to the official, the senior C.I.A. leaders in attendance withheld their applause, particularly as Trump launched an attack on the “dishonest media” over the reporting of his inauguration crowd size. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler made a similar claim on Twitter, writing that “the folks in the front apparently didn’t react until the end.” NBC’s Katie Tur noted that “senior leadership remained stoic, and did not applaud the more political lines.”

The remainder of the 400-person crowd was, as Post reporter Greg Miller wrote on Twitter, “a self-selected bunch,” as thousands of invitations to the event had been e-mailed last week. A former top C.I.A. official also downplayed the crowd’s reaction to the president. “They are good, polite people,” the former official told Newsweek. “He’s the president and he is kissing their ass, why wouldn’t they clap?”

In fact, the visit seems to have done more harm than good. One official told CBS that Trump’s speech “made relations with the intelligence community worse,” while others described to the outlet being “stunned and at times offended” by the president’s flippant remarks in front of the Memorial Wall, which he only flippantly acknowledged once. George Little, who served as the spokesman for former C.I.A. director Leon Panetta, also derided the president’s appearance at the agency. “Today the president of the United States stood in front of the Memorial Wall honoring the CIA’s fallen and mocked key institutions of our democracy, threatened to steal Iraq's oil, and used what is supposed to be a non-political government agency—one he recently accused of Nazi-style behavior—as a political backdrop,” he said on his Facebook page, Newsweek reports. It would be remembered, he added, as the “most disastrous speech ever given at C.I.A. headquarters.”