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For Trump, who sees himself and his achievements in superlative terms, the inauguration’s crowd size has been a source of grievance that he appears unable to put behind him. It is a measure of his fixation on the issue that he would devote part of his first morning in office to it – and that he would take out his frustrations on an acting Park Service director.

Word rapidly spread through the agency and Washington. The individuals who informed The Washington Post about the call declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the conversation.

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Neither Reynolds nor the Park Service would talk about it.

“The National Park Service does not comment on internal conversations among administration officials,” agency spokesman Thomas Crosson said.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the call simply demonstrated that Trump’s management style is to be “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”

“He’s not somebody who sits around and waits. He takes action and gets things done,” Sanders said. “That’s one of the reasons that he is president today, and Hillary Clinton isn’t.”

On Saturday, the same day Trump spoke with Reynolds, the new president used an appearance at CIA headquarters to deliver a blistering attack on the media for reporting that large swaths of the Mall were nearly empty during the event.

“It’s a lie,” Trump said. “We caught [the media]. We caught them in a beauty.”

“It looked like a million, a million and a half people,” Trump said, vastly inflating what the available evidence suggested.