"Any White House has a very large megaphone, and officials must be careful in how they use it," warns The Washington Post's nonpartisan fact-checking team Friday. "It is especially important to stick to the facts. "

Team Trump has struggled with that. Inauguration crowd sizes. Alternative facts. Whether Trump had called the travel ban a "ban."

The latest example of facts getting away from the White House is a doozy: Senior adviser Kellyanne Conway went on TV on Thursday to defend the president's travel ban and cited a "Bowling Green massacre" that the press allegedly ignored.

Except — there was no "massacre." In 2011, two Iraqis in Bowling Green, Ky., were arrested on charges that they had attempted to send weapons to al-Qaeda. There has never been a terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Ky., carried out by Iraqis or anyone else. The arrests alone — heavily covered in the press — caused a national uproar.

(In a rare reversal for the White House, Conway later admitted she'd been in error):

So why does Team Trump struggle with the facts on so many issues? Three theories:

1) They're trying to distract us: This is one of the most prominent theories on the left. Trump's laserlike focus on crowd size came as he signed an executive order to start unraveling Obamacare. We're talking about a nonexistent massacre as news that somewhere between 60,000 to 100,000 visas were revoked due to the travel ban.

Of course, this theory suggests that people (and journalists) can only pay attention to one news story at a time. If you read just five minutes of political news a day (like this newsletter!) you know that's not true.

2) They're trying to undermine the media: What's real and what's fake if we can just call falsehoods "alternative facts?" Is there such a thing as "real news" if we can just call something we don't agree with "fake news"?

All this casual throwing around of the term "fake" is indeed corrosive to a free press culture. But if that's their goal, it's not working: Subscriptions to many major news organizations have actually gone up in the Trump era.

(Oh, by the way, just casually throwing out that you can subscribe to read unlimited Washington Post digital content for a year for 1/10th of what the average American spends on coffee in the same time frame.)

(Matt McClain/ The Washington Post)

3) The White House doesn't have their message straight: It's a week after one of the highest-profile executive orders in recent memory, and Conway's interview suggests that the White House is struggling with how to defend it — even with what  to name it. Perhaps they just don't have their talking points down, says The Fix's Aaron Blake, who wisely reminds us that "sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely one."

Is Trump moving too fast?

President Trump and Vice President Pence at the swearing in for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)