It’s taken me all day to catch up with the story about Trump going whining to the Park Service demanding new photos that showed 10 billion people on the Mall for his inauguration.

On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration, acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds received an extraordinary summons: The new president wanted to talk to him.

In a Saturday phone call, Trump personally ordered Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall, according to three individuals who have knowledge of the conversation. The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.

Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

According to one account, Reynolds had been contacted by the White House and given a phone number to call. When he dialed it, he was told to hold for the president.

He’s that pathetic and ridiculous and vain and childish. And he has the nuclear codes.

Word rapidly spread through the agency and Washington. The individuals who informed The Washington Post about the call did so on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the conversation.

Yeah…it’s “sensitive” because it demonstrates how pathetic and ridiculous and vain and childish he is.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the call simply demonstrated that Trump’s management style is to be “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”

“He’s not somebody who sits around and waits. He takes action and gets things done,” Sanders said. “That’s one of the reasons that he is president today, and Hillary Clinton isn’t.”

No actually it’s because Comey sent that letter to Congress just before the election. Taking action isn’t an inherent good; it has to be the right action. Action in the form of badgering government officials to produce non-existent evidence of adoring crowds is not the right action, to put it mildly.

Reynolds was taken aback by Trump’s request, but he did secure some additional aerial photographs and forwarded them to the White House through normal channels in the Interior Department, the people who notified The Post said. The photos, however, did not prove Trump’s contention that the crowd size was upward of 1 million.

That’s because Reynold’s ignored his clear duty to fake them.

Trump, meanwhile, has continued to press the argument that the media has given a misleading account of the crowds that attended his inauguration.

“I had a massive amount of people here,” the president told ABC News anchor David Muir in an interview Wednesday. “They were showing pictures that were very unflattering, as unflattering — from certain angles — that were taken early and lots of other things.”

As he guided Muir through the West Wing, Trump paused at a photo on the wall, taken from behind him as he delivered his inaugural address: “Here’s a picture of the event. Here’s a picture of the crowd. Now, the audience was the biggest ever, but this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive.”

He blathered at Hannity on Fox about it yesterday, too, saying the photograph was from the wrong end, from the back, and if they’d taken it from where he was, why, it would have looked entirely different. Yes, it would, but that’s because of how human eyesight works, not because there were actually more people provided you looked from the Congress end of the Mall.

And he has the nuclear codes.