The fairy-tale wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on Saturday attracted huge crowds to Windsor, England, a short train ride from London. Fans of the royal family jammed the streets of Windsor as the newlyweds traveled in a horse-drawn carriage through the historic town.

The BBC found the joyful occasion a perfect opportunity to use Twitter to share side-by-side photos showing the crowds outside Windsor Castle alongside the crowds on the National Mall on the day of President Trump’s inauguration.

In Windsor, the day was sunny and the vibe was jubilant for Harry to share wedding vows with Meghan. The mood and the size of the crowd in the town in southeastern England, estimated to be more than 100,000, stood in stark contrast to President Trump’s inauguration, where the skies were cloudy and the streets were filled with thousands of people protesting Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, where he would be bringing his explicit brand of racism and sexism to the White House.


Attendance at Trump’s inauguration was estimated to be between 300,000 and 600,000, well above the number of people physically able to fit into the small town of Windsor but far below the 1.8 million people who came to Washington to celebrate President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.

Compare the crowds: 2009 inauguration at left, 2017 inauguration at right.#Inauguration pic.twitter.com/y7RhIR2nfC — Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) January 20, 2017

The crowd in Windsor could have looked bigger than Trump’s inauguration because the town’s streets are narrow and the people’s smiles were wide. Plus, unlike the tactics employed by the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, British police chose not to shoot tear gas into the throngs of royal wedding fans, thereby allowing photographers to get good shots of the crowd size.

BBC Three was not alone in its comparison of crowds. Author J.K. Rowling also posted side-by-side photos with the words Love > Hate.


Other social media users also got into the act, hoping to get the president’s goat with the side-by-side birds-eye comparisons.

Since he assumed the office, Trump has shown he is extremely touchy about crowd sizes. During his first appearance as Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, notoriously said the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was the largest there had ever been.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”

Trump himself later claimed that more than a million people attended his inauguration, an obvious untruthful statement — otherwise known as a lie — something his administration has become famous for telling on a daily basis.