Some media observers pointed out that Sean Spicer attempted to act as President Donald Trump's rodeo clown. | Getty Sean Spicer and the 'rodeo clown' strategy

A quick briefing on rodeo clowns, for those unfamiliar: In bull riding, when a bucked rider finds himself in the path of a charging steer, the clowns are tasked with jumping into the arena and kicking up enough of a fuss to pull the bull their way. A clown might get upended, but the rider gets a clear path to safety.

That is, as several astute media observers pointed out over the weekend, not all that far from what Sean Spicer attempted Saturday night. With mass protests taking aim at Trump's presidency and the press taking notice, Spicer came out and, by haranguing reporters and coughing up 5 falsehoods in 5 minutes, did all he could to get to draw attention away from the marches.

Candidate-Trump employed the same tactic throughout the campaign, as POLITICO's Jack Shafer points out.

Whenever [Trump] finds the noose of news lowering over his thick orange neck, he takes to Twitter to change the subject. The more outrageous and self-serving (or should I say “self-dealing”?) the tweets are, the better his results.

On Saturday, the obvious news peg for the press was well-attended protests against his inauguration in Washington, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and elsewhere in the world. So Trump sent his press secretary out to essentially speak one of his tweets by falsely stating that “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period” viewed the Trump event. In doing so, Trump-Spicer snipped the peak off of the protest coverage by making muddy what was clear about the audience size. To believe Spicer, you must accept that an invisible majority filled the Mall and that stealth supporters dressed as bleachers occupied those near-vacant grandstands along the parade route, and as you contemplate the truth value of his statement, you begin to forget about the massive scale of the anti-Trump protests.

And while Spicer made himself into a meme, he's unlikely to be too upset about it. Back during the campaign, the Washington Post's Ben Terris wrote about when the then-RNC spokesman was mocked for defending Melania Trump's plagiarized convention speech by name-checking "My Little Pony." If the goal was to wound Spicer, it failed, as Terris notes he looks back on the ordeal fondly.

Spicer just grinned. Was it an absurd sound bite? Of course. But he had succeeded in getting the media to talk about “commonly used phrases” and, in general, treating the whole ordeal like a big joke. The Art of the Spiel: If you don’t like the conversation, change it.