The West Front of the U.S. Capitol is prepared for inauguration day on Jan. 19 in Washington D.C. | Getty Trump's crowd size misses his mark

For someone preoccupied with the size of his audiences, President Donald Trump appeared to draw an anemic one on Friday.

In the run-up to the inauguration, Trump had promised an "unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout," but early evidence suggests the festivities in Washington fell far short of that mark.


A side-by-side NPR comparison of aerial photos from the National Mall during Trump's inauguration and former President Barack Obama's 2009 swearing in, one of many shared on social media on Friday, showed Obama drawing a far larger audience. Television networks also noted the size discrepancy, although aides to the famously competitive incoming president have yet to offer projections of their own.

An estimated 1.8 million people attended Obama's first inauguration, and D.C. officials initially forecast upward of 800,000 would be on hand for Trump's swearing-in and subsequent celebrations. However, there will be no formal count from the National Park Service, which stopped publicly gauging the size of Mall events after dueling forecasts for the 1995 Million Man March sparked a lawsuit threat.

That makes any potential attendance claims from Trump and his team troublesome to verify, particularly in the age of “fake news.”

Steve Doig, an Arizona State University journalism professor who has tracked crowd estimates for more than 20 years, predicted that a dispute over Trump’s inaugural crowd size is “certain to happen, given that a high number has always been a token of importance.”

“Unlike some of the claims the president-elect has made, where there has been a way to measure the claim against a metric, this one will be easier for him,” Doig said. “There isn’t going to be an easy way to check it.”

While aerial photos offer a common method to project the size of crowds on the mall, the total inaugural head count becomes trickier given that Washington is still swelling with demonstrators planning to attend one or more of the 21 protests that were granted Park Service permits for inauguration weekend — or some of the unsanctioned events that erupted on the sidelines Friday. Several isolated skirmishes between protesters and police had resulted in more than 90 arrests as of press time, according to law enforcement officials.

Attendance at Obama's second inauguration in 2013 was pegged at 1 million after initial projections of 800,000, about double the number estimated for George W. Bush's second inauguration in 2005. D.C. officials' record-high estimate for Obama's first swearing-in was not contested by NPS at the time.

Trump’s propensity for celebrating the perceived size of crowds at his campaign rallies reached a peak on the eve of his election, when he claimed that he got “far bigger crowds” than Beyoncé and Jay-Z — two pop stars who endorsed his opponent, Hillary Clinton. (PolitiFact rated the claim False.)

To promote the inauguration, Trump and his aides have lately turned to social media, including Facebook ads and a video with the president-elect personally inviting supporters to a Thursday “welcome concert” in his honor. Attendance at the Thursday concert also appeared to fall short of Obama's 2009 pre-inauguration show based on visual comparisons, with reports circulating that estimated a crowd of 10,000 at Trump's affair versus 400,000 for Obama’s.

Rain was forecast for Trump’s inauguration, but showers ended up being spotty throughout the day. The inaugural parade on Friday afternoon drew crowds that were four to five people deep, according to pool reports.

The biggest of the inauguration weekend’s planned protests, the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday, said in its NPS permit application that 200,000 people would attend. But the burgeoning House Democratic boycott of the inauguration may yet drive up attendance at the protest march, where Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is among the scheduled speakers.

Other demonstrations held Friday included a Bikers for Trump gathering, which its leader has said could end up providing a “wall of meat” to protect the incoming president. Trump himself has tweeted to welcome the group, which estimated to NPS that 5,000 people would attend its rally.

The Park Service makes its own advance forecast of crowds for planning, spokesman Mike Litterst said, but otherwise looks to groups that stage events to provide their own numbers.

“Due to the difficulty in accurately assessing crowd estimates for large events, most notably following 1995’s Million Man March, the National Park Service no longer makes it a practice to provide crowd estimates for permitted events,” Litterst wrote in an email.

“While we make internal estimates for staffing, security and emergency response purposes, it is left to the discretion of event organizers to make a determination of the event attendance.”