Dallas Stars Jumbotron Trolls Trump Administration for False Claims About Inauguration Attendance

Even professional hockey teams from Texas are clowning the new president

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Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, caught a lot of flack for artificially inflating the attendance numbers for Trump’s Friday inauguration. Social media went off about it, and whoever operates the Jumbotron at Dallas Stars home games got in on the fun.

“This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said, with strong emphasis on “period.” “Both in person and around the globe.”

Trump himself echoed that sentiment in comments he made at CIA HQ in Langley, Va. on Saturday.

“I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field,” Trump said. “I’m like, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people.”

None of this, by any measure that we have, is true. There were definitely not a million-and-a-half people at the inauguration.

There have been many jokes, and also pointed criticisms, about the Trump administration’s strange inflated attendance claims throughout the day on Saturday. But perhaps the best of these came from a hockey team’s Jumbotron operator.

During the Dallas Stars game Saturday night against the Washington Capitols (this zinger made even better coming during a game against D.C.’s team), the big screen displayed the game’s attendance, as is typical at most sporting events. Except the screen didn’t list the game’s true attendance.

For the record: the American Airlines Center, which also hosts the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, has a maximum capacity of 19,323 for hockey games and 21,146 for basketball. Not 1.5 million.

That’s pretty funny.

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