Before getting down to business in his first press conference with reporters on Jan. 21, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer took a few minutes to discredit the news media for inaccurately reporting the size of President Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd.
The Sun contacted an actual witness to the ceremony—California 24th District Congressional Rep. Salud Carbajal, who attended both inaugurations of former President Barack Obama, and said he noticed a “clear” difference between the crowds.
At the most recent inauguration, Carbajal was seated among his colleagues in the House of Representatives on the Capitol steps behind Trump. He was careful to compare the Jan. 20 ceremony with Obama’s 2009 inauguration crowd, which he described as a “mass amoeba of people.”
“Clearly, there was a difference in numbers,” Carbajal told the Sun, noting that the D.C. metro system came to a halt at Obama’s first inauguration because so many people showed up.
Obama’s second inauguration wasn’t as big as the first, he added, which had a “tad less, but still quite a bit.”
The crowd issue started when Trump complained about news reports regarding a tweet during a Jan. 21 speech at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The tweet came from the National Park Service’s (NPS) account, the agency that oversees that National Mall in Washington, D.C., where the inaugural ceremony is held, and contained a Reuters picture showing a side-by-side comparison of what appears to be more people for Obama’s 2009 inaugural ceremony.
At the press conference, Spicer said the tweet “intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that it gathered on the National Mall.”
Trump reportedly then ordered the Department of the Interior to halt the NPS Twitter account, although it was back online the next day with an apology.
“We regret the mistaken RTs [re-tweets] from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you,” the tweet read.
The NPS doesn’t keep official numbers on those who turn out for the ceremony. Spicer claimed that the “420,000 people” who used the D.C. metro as a benchmark to measure crowd size and also included people who weren’t there.
Carbajal noted that significantly more people—around 500,000 by some estimates—turned out for the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., on the day after Trump’s inauguration.
On that day, Carbajal marched in solidarity with similar marches in cities worldwide, including San Luis Obispo—which itself drew anywhere between 7,000 to 10,000 people—Santa Barbara, and Santa Maria.
Although in D.C., Carbajal marched in step with the hundreds of thousands across the country to bring attention to various women’s issues that he believes are in jeopardy under the new president.
“It’s so disappointing that the Trump administration would focus on such an insignificant issue in the first two days of his … presidency, to refute the size of the crowds,” Carbajal said. “It’s just so silly that he would spend his time doing that.”
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 2, 2017.