Fox News shielding Trump's 'tortured psyche' by ignoring 'sparse crowd': analysts

President Donald Trump's crowd-size anxiety exploded back into view when his Great American State Fair kickoff event drew a strikingly thin turnout.

The 80-year-old president claimed 45,000 people showed up on the National Mall to watch Lee Greenwood and the FBI director's girlfriend perform, but media accounts estimated about 1,000 attendees – fewer than some outdoor movie screenings – had actually turned out, and The New Republic's Greg Sargent said on his "Daily Blast" podcast that Trump can't handle that kind of disappointment.

"Donald Trump isn’t calling for people to show up at this thing on July 4 solely because he wants adulation and big crowds, right?" Sargent said. "Although of course he does want those things, and it drives him absolutely insane when he doesn’t get them and when others get larger crowds. This is just a fact of Trump’s tortured psyche – we know this."

Fox News heavily hyped the state fair's kickoff and placed Trump front and center in the celebration, but Gertz noted the conservative network barely covered the event after the poor attendance became clear.

"It’s been as sparse as the crowd," Gertz said. "For all of the lead-up that they had, on the day of the event, the morning after was extremely quiet. They’ve spent very little time discussing any of this. Which I think tracks with their effort to shield viewers from understanding how unpopular the president is. If you can only get like a thousand people to come to this rally, then he must be in pretty sad straits."

Trump's response to the turnout reminded Gertz of one-time White House press secretary Sean Spicer telling reporters that his 2017 inauguration was the largest crowd in history, when it was obvious that Barack Obama had a much higher turnout.

"It’s the sort of thing that drives Trump crazy," Gertz said. "He can’t stand that he had such a small audience, and I think, as the clip you played shows, he’s voicing that a little bit. I think we can expect some sort of push to try to get more people to show up for the big July 4 event that’s planned."

"Though I have to be honest with you, Washington, D.C. on July 4 is not a pleasant place to be," he added, "and they are predicting an extreme heat wave late next week. So we’ll see how all of this goes. But it doesn’t seem likely to turn out well."