Never one to miss an opportunity to complain about the “failing” New York Times, Trump piled on, too.

“A big lie” is a bit of a stretch, but Trump and the Patriots did have a point. Seating staffers on the lawn, instead of posing them on the stairs, made the turnout discrepancy appear larger than it was. However, this year's player delegation was considerably smaller than that of two years ago: 34, down from 50.

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Athletes on championship-winning teams skip White House visits for any number of reasons — Tom Brady, a Trump supporter, attributed his absence Wednesday to “personal family matters,” for example — but five Patriots players said they were boycotting Trump.

Defensive tackle Alan Branch, who has three daughters, told the Boston Globe he was offended by the way Trump talked about women on a 2005 recording published by The Washington Post last fall.

“I wouldn’t spend time away from my family to shake the hand of a guy I wouldn’t want to meet with or talk to,” Branch said. “I can’t see myself going and then hanging out with my kids and pretending everything was all right.”

In any case, the Patriots' defensiveness about their attendance recalled the White House's angry response to reports that Trump's Inauguration Day crowd was smaller than Obama's in 2009.

“At a time when our nation and the world was watching the peaceful transition of power and, as the president said, the transition and the balance of power from Washington to the citizens of the United States, some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on the day after Trump's inauguration. “Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.”

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Spicer went on to cite false attendance figures. The fact is that Trump's crowd was smaller than Obama's.