PRESS AND PREZ NEED TO FOCUS ON WHAT MATTERS

Voter after voter I’ ve spoken to ... didn’ t care about the crowd ’ size. They wish he didn’ t either.

SINCE Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, he has rolled back ObamaCare mandates; met with the top business leaders in the country including the CEOs of Dell, Whirlpool, Ford, Lockheed Martin and US Steel; withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership; and offered Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi support for his country’s fight against terrorism and to bolster his economic-reform program.

He also met with top union leaders and frontline workers, including members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, the North American Building and Construction Trades Department, the Sheet Metal Workers Union and dozens more.

He signed executive orders to revive the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, signed another order to expedite environmental reviews of other infrastructure projects and began the process of securing the border with a meeting at the Department of Homeland Security. And that was all by Wednesday morning. But the focus in my profession has been a relentless dissection of every particle of hyperbole he has uttered, mostly lies about crowd sizes and false claims that millions of illegals voted in the election. It has sucked up much of the oxygen on social media, and it’s been spattered across the headlines of print and online newspapers.

To be clear: It deserves some of this attention. Calling out government disinformation is a critical part of our job in the press.

But we reporters have a problem: We point out, correctly, that a dishonest White House will quickly lose the trust of the public, especially in times of crisis. But fewer and fewer Americans trust us, too. And our parochial fixations are part of the reason.

Case in point: When Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, the coverage was epic; when biblical floods hit the Midwest last year, it was B roll. Reporters spent weeks asking how the government was going to pay for the damage in the eastern corridor while Midwesterners were relying on each other and their churches to rebuild.

So when they see us spend more of our time obsessing over the same hyperbole Trump said four days after he says it, without giving equal time to the things that he has actually done, our parochialism becomes once again impossible to ignore from the voters, our viewers and our readers.

But that doesn’t let Trump off the hook — nor should it. He, too, is obsessing over minor details and overshadowing his own actions. That, after all, is why the press is talking about it in the first place. Voter after voter I’ve spoken to, certainly including some who didn’t support Trump, didn’t care about the crowd size. They wish he didn’t either. And they wish my profession would stop talking about it.

In this, the press corps can accomplish two things in one: If we can steer the conversation away from distractions, we can regain some of the public’s trust while also hopefully leading the president back to more serious ground as well.

If we strike a balance of reminding him words matter, while reporting on his achievements and not let one outweigh the other, the next four years might be more interesting than we imagined, and less outrageous than we expected.