This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Donald Trump has stayed true to campaign-trail form, using his personal Twitter account rather than his newly acquired handle @POTUS on Sunday to praise his own performance in a meeting with intelligence officials and dismiss the worldwide protests against his presidency.

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A little after 7am ET, the president tweeted:

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Had a great meeting at CIA Headquarters yesterday, packed house, paid great respect to Wall, long standing ovations, amazing people. WIN!

Trump spoke on Saturday at the CIA HQ in Virginia, in front of the memorial wall for officers killed in the line of duty.

His 15-minute speech included boasts about the supposed – and inaccurate – size of crowds for his inauguration; expressions of airily defined love and support for intelligence agencies with which he has been at odds over their belief in Russian attempts to influence the election on his behalf; boasts about the number of times he has appeared on the cover of Time magazine; the supposed fact that it stopped raining when he spoke at the Capitol on Friday (it didn’t); and an insinuation that he might start another war in Iraq.

The speech met with laughter and applause from an audience composed largely of CIA staffers. On Saturday night, however, the recently retired CIA director John Brennan communicated through a former aide that he was “deeply saddened and angered at Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandisement” in front of the memorial wall.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said it was time for the president “to put in his own security intelligence community” and added: “We really would prefer the intelligence community that’s going out the door to be much more respectful toward the president and his vision in moving forward.”



Conway called Brennan’s statement “unremarkable, spectacularly disappointing” and said: “We have an outgoing CIA director sound like a partisan political hack about the president of the United States.”

“I think everybody needs to take a step back and a very deep breath,” she said, “… and think about what the words are.”

The confirmation of Trump’s pick to succeed Brennan, congressman Mike Pompeo, has been delayed in the Senate, where Democrats have expressed concern over his position on the use of torture and remarks about the use of mass surveillance.

Conway also said the Trump White House would not interfere with intelligence agencies’ investigations into possible links between Trump campaign aides and Russia.

“I was the campaign manager contemporaneous with some of those events and I assure you that I wasn’t talking to Moscow,” she said.

Trump aides reported to be under scrutiny include former campaign chief Paul Manafort, foreign policy adviser Carter Page and Roger Stone, a veteran Republican operative long associated with Trump.

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Trump did not mention the huge protests against his presidency that were held on Saturday in Washington, New York, Chicago, many other US cities and many more across the globe.



The marches and the size of crowds for Trump’s inauguration on Friday were the subject of a remarkable and widely criticised appearance by the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, at the White House early on Saturday evening.

Spicer harangued the press corps for allegedly misleading the nation about the audience for Trump’s inauguration, then refused to take questions and left.

Many news sources published refutations of Spicer’s claims. The New York Times, citing “people familiar with Mr Trump’s thinking” reported that the president thought Spicer had “gone too far”.

Trump, however, turned to the subject on Sunday morning, tweeting:

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.

Celebrities including Madonna, Janelle Monáe and Michael Moore addressed crowds in Washington on Saturday. Organisers told the Guardian they estimated more than a million people had attended.

Trump lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million ballots, but won the presidency in the electoral college.

Trump later added: “Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don’t always agree, I recognise the rights of people to express their views.”

On Sunday, the president also tweeted about TV ratings for his inauguration on Friday. “Wow, television ratings just out,” he wrote. “31 million people watched the Inauguration, 11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!”

His comparison was with Barack Obama’s second inauguration, an event inevitably less watched than his first which attracted crowds of a similar size to Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington.