[More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.]
On the 23 January 2017 edition of Anderson Cooper 360, CNN's Van Jones offered his theory about the controversy over the size of the crowd that attended President Trump's inauguration: "Ordinary leaders rely on the Constitution as a source of their legitimacy. But you get these kind of leaders that have these more authoritarian overtones — it's not the power of our constitution; it's the size of their crowds. The legitimacy doesn't come from these documents. They come from the fact that I represent something." Jones later added, "When you diminish his crowd size, it's...a blow to his sense of legitimacy."