On Friday, January 20, Donald Trump was sworn into office as the 45th President of the United States. And on Day 2 of his role as Commander in Chief, both Trump and his press secretary Sean Spicer spent time lying to the American people.

During Trump's inaugural address, many people were quick to notice the stark differences between the crowd at Trump's inauguration versus Obama's inauguration. Side-by-side photos quickly made their rounds on social media, comparing the view of the National Mall on Friday with how it looked in 2009 when former President Obama took the oath of office. With one glance at the photos, it is clearly obvious that Obama had the larger crowd.

In addition to the photo comparisons, numbers were soon calculated on Friday that supported these visuals. CNN reported that an estimated 1.8 million people attended Obama's inauguration in 2009, while approximately 250,000 tickets were distributed for Trump's inauguration this year. CNN also pointed out that the photo in question of Trump's inauguration was taken during his speech – which should have been peak time for his crowd.

Yesterday, both Trump and Spicer took time out of their day to claim that these facts reported by the media were lies. Trump, who was speaking at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, departed from his original message in order to defend his inauguration's attendance.

"I turn on this thing and by mistake, I get this network," Trump said while at the CIA. "And it showed an empty field. And it said we drew 250,000 people. Now that's not bad. But it's a lie."

Later in the day, Sean Spicer gave a public statement where he blasted the media, claiming that they mislead the public with the photo comparisons of Trump's inauguration. Spicer said, "Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular Tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe."

Spicer went on to claim that several factors contributed to the "appearance" of a smaller crowd at Trump's inauguration. He said that "for the first time," fencing and magnetometers (A.K.A. metal detectors) were used on the Mall, which were responsible for "preventing hundreds of thousands of people being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had inaugurations past." This is incorrect; a 2017 Congressional Research Service report shows that magnetometers have certainly been used in past inaugurations. Additionally, the New York Times learned that magnetometers were not even used on the areas that Spicer indicated.

Furthermore, Spicer's claim that "no one had numbers" is also untrue. Politifact shows that Trump's official estimated attendance was anywhere between 250,000 and 600,000, while Obama's attendance in 2013 was 1 million. Attendance at Obama's 2009 inauguration was approximately 1.8 million.