A general view of atmosphere during the Inauguration of President-Elect Donald Trump on January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

The size of an inauguration crowd isn’t normally at the top of a new president’s agenda, but Donald Trump was apparently so troubled by the optics of a sparse turnout that he pressured the acting director of the National Park Service to find proof that attendance broke records. It didn’t, by the way.

The Washington Post reports that on Trump’s first morning in office, he called Acting Director Michael T. Reynolds personally to demand more photographs of the crowds on the Mall that would demonstrate the media lied about turnout.

While crowd size is notoriously difficult to calculate, so much so that NPS has stopped giving official numbers, side-by-side images comparing Trump’s inauguration to Obama’s in 2009 and Metro ridership both clearly show that Trump’s claim is false.

Neither Reynolds nor NPS would officially discuss the call with the Post.

The National Park Service has emerged at the center of a number of early dust-ups with the administration. On Inauguration Day, the NPS Twitter account was temporarily shut down after it retweeted photos that unfavorably compared the turnout at Trump’s inauguration to Barack Obama’s in 2009. Since then, a number of National Park twitter accounts have been posting about climate change and Japanese internment.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The Post that the call showed that Trump is “so accessible, and constantly in touch.” She added that “he’s not somebody who sits around and waits. He takes action and gets things done.”

What, precisely, Trump accomplished by trying to enlist NPS’s acting director on a vanity project is unknown, but it’s clear that Trump is fixated on the inaugural crowd size.

Later on Saturday, he griped about the media misrepresenting the attendance numbers at a Central Intelligence Agency visit. One official described the meeting to CBS as “uncomfortable.”

That evening, White House spokesperson Sean Spicer used his first press conference to lie and shame the media for accurately reporting the crowd size. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration. Period,” Spicer said, falsely, in a scream. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”

Trump doesn’t seem likely to give up this fixation. In an interview with ABC on Wednesday, he continued to brag that “they say I had the biggest crowd in the history of inaugural speeches.”

“I’m not interested in the inaugural crowd size,” interviewer David Muir responded. “I think the American people can look at images side by side and decide for themselves.”