President Trump’s White House wasted no time in coming up with a term for its propaganda: “alternative facts.” On his first full day in office, the new president told CIA employees he had a “running war with the media” and then escalated it by accusing journalists of distorting the size of the crowd at his inauguration.

“We caught them in a beauty,” Trump said of the news media, “and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”

Trump also made the ludicrous argument that his feud with the intelligence community was a media creation. His succession of tweets challenged the veracity of U.S. intelligence and even accused the community of allowing a leak about an unsubstantiated evidence about his dealings in Russia. “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he tweeted about that leak.

Within hours, the White House doubled down on its disinformation, sending out press secretary Sean Spicer to make the readily refutable claim that the Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” Aerial photographs comparing Friday’s crowd with the 2009 Obama inauguration clearly showed otherwise. So did the ridership figures for Washington’s Metro system. Metro officials said Friday’s ridership was 570,000, compared with 782,000 four years ago and more than 1 million for President Obama’s first inauguration.

Spicer delivered his remarks in a testy tone and took no questions.

“We’re going to hold the press accountable,” Spicer warned.

A defiant Kellyanne Conway, formerly the campaign manager and now a counselor to Trump, refused to back down from the White House falsehood on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood,” Conway snapped at host Chuck Todd. She said Spicer was merely offering “alternative facts.”

The dissembling by Trump and his team was striking in its pettiness and audacity, and ominous in what it portends for the credibility of the White House. There will be times when any administration must ask Americans to trust facts that cannot be immediately viewed and assessed by outside watchdogs. Team Trump served notice to the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Washington, and many more across the nation, that their apprehensions about the judgment and temperament of the new administration are well justified.

The women’s march signaled the breadth and depth of disgust with Trump’s persona as well as his policies. Pink hats with cat ears were the sartorial statement of the day in reference to lewd remarks Trump had made about sexual assault in a 2005 video that surfaced during the campaign. But concerns about myriad other issues were reflected in the homemade signs: from climate change and police brutality to reproductive rights and immigration.

It remains to be seen whether this remarkable show of resistance was a singular cathartic moment for Americans frustrated at the election outcome or the beginning of a sustained campaign to hold this White House accountable.

The challenge to the nation was set in high relief on the first weekend of the Trump presidency.