The National Park Service on Monday released dozens of photographs of President Donald Trump’s inauguration that appear to counter Trump’s claim that up to 1.5 million attended the event at the Capitol and National Mall.
The photos were released in response to news media requests made through the Freedom of Information Act. The park service also released photos from President Barack Obama’s two inaugurations. The photos show the 2009 event far outstripped the number of people who attended Trump’s inauguration.
While there are no time stamps, the photos clearly show crowds gathering near the Capitol’s West Front stage for the ceremony. Crowds did not extend to the Washington Monument as Trump later asserted. Large swaths of empty space are visible on the Mall.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer claimed that news media photos of the inauguration were “intentionally framed in a way…to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.” The park service photos are from a variety of angles, both from the air and on the ground.
Photos taken during Obama’s 2009 inauguration showed substantially more people on the Mall than during Trump’s swearing-in.
Spicer said the audience at Trump’s inauguration “was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
The exact size of the crowd at the Jan. 20 swearing-in may never be known. The National Park Service stopped providing crowd estimates in the 1990s.
It is not known how many people watched the ceremony on television and online worldwide. In the U.S., Nielsen estimates 31 million viewers watched TV coverage, but that’s less than Obama’s and Ronald Reagan’s first inaugurations.
(AP)
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5 Responses
These people are lying lunatics of the lowest kind, telling us what our eyes see is not true.
Why would anyone be surprised? Even Trump’s own agencies are saying he lies about much of what he says, whether its crowds at inaugural, numbers of Americans looking for jobs, numbers of illegal aliens voting in federal elections, or whether the FBI requested wiretaps of the Trump campaign. His spokesmen (and women) bravely come out to the press room every day and attempt to clean up the XXX their boss left with his latest twitters by saying “he has access to information that no one else has”, or that there are “alternative facts”.
Has the size of the audience at a presidential inauguration ever been a subject of interest more than 6 weeks after the event? I guess it is an issue as long as the inauguree continues to lie about it. Sad.
When will Trump apologize for his lies, his baseless slander against the media and for misleading the American people? The president lacks apparently lacks a moral conscience.
Didn’t all of you vote for him? Is anyone really surprised by any of this?