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Not criticizing, asking a question to become more educated:
Could the telephoto create a little over-emphasis? Like holding out a fish away from you during a picture to make it look a tad bigger?
I really liked your clip from Jaws showing the compression effect. But careful clipping and compression might make it seem like there are more people in a spread out space than there really are. People seem more crowded together. So, while the photo is most likely not doctored, and the crowd probably really was around 15k, the compression effect COULD make it look more "crowded" than it really was, because people are more spread out than they appear, right?
Trump's tweet here is definitely stupid. I'm not arguing that.
Good question.
A telephoto would generally show fewer people, because it has a smaller angle of view. That would work in your favor to look like a bigger crowd, only if the entire crowd fits into that defined angle of view.
A 300mm lens (what I think was used) has about an 8 degree field of view, while a 50mm lens (considered a normal lens; closest to our natural vision) has about a 45 degree angle of view.
So if you squeezed everyone into that 8 degree field of view, it would look like there is more than there were, because you don't expect the entire crowd to be in that and you expect there to be other people.
But that isn't really what is happening in that photo:
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It is showing like a hundred people, out of a crowd that had considerably more.
Wide shot:
So in showing a big crowd, the telephoto version from the original did a disservice to the crowd size, as compared to the wide angle from inside the hangar.
All the telelphoto lens really did was make it look like the crowd was closer to AF2 than it really was. But that isn't really manipulating in any real meaningful way.
For our hunters, think of it as looking through your range finder or scope. You have a much smaller field of view, but things look closer to you. 50mm is about your normal vision, 100mm is 2x, 200mm is 4x and 300 would be 4.5x. Another way to think of it is that for every 100mm in lens focal length, you get about 10yards of magnification. So that 300mm lens would be like being 30 yards closer. My main field sports lens is a 400mm.
For portraits, the wrong focal length can distort the face a great deal, for the same reasons at play above. I prefer being between 85mm and 200mm. A wider lens won't compress the face enough and make the nose look much more prominent than it actually is.
Wide angle on the left, telephoto on the right.
So more than you were asking, but thats how these things work.
