The Woman’s March, and the inauguration become a hot topic. That is much ado about nothing.
On Friday Donald J. Trump, was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, in front a very large, very optimistic, very enthusiastic crowd on the Washington Mall. The numbers were impressive as the inaugural committee reported that about 250,000 tickets to President Trump’s ceremony were distributed, and that additional onlookers were in attendance on the Mall Friday estimates put the number at around 500,000, which is an impressive number.
However, the turnout appears to be much lower than the estimated 1.8 million people who came out for President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Which was a truly historic event as the United States swore in the countries African American president.
The television ratings for President Trumps inauguration was watched by 31 million. That would make it the second highest rated, inauguration in history, behind the 37.5 million people that watched President Obama, in 2009.
Compounding this problem was the dispute over crowd size of Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington protest event. The evet was billed as a chance for women worldwide to make their voices heard not only by President Trump, but to both the Republican’s as well as the Democrats in Congress that they expected women’s rights to protected.
In Washington, crowd estimates for the protest march were in the same range or a bit bigger than Friday’s Trump inauguration.
So, now we had not one, not two but three crowd estimates in dispute as we moved into the first day of the Trump presidency.
In his first White House briefing Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday night he claimed that reporters had engaged in “deliberately false reporting” in the past 24 hours since President Trump took the oath of office. He then left the White House briefing room without taking any questions.
“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,” Spicer claimed.
He blamed new floor coverings on mall areas that “had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.” And Spicer claimed that fences and magnetometers going further back than ever prevented “hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the mall as quickly as they had in years past.”
The battle over who had the biggest crowd seemed to be the topic of the day. In one attempt to rate the size of yesterday’s inauguration crowd, WMATA, the transit system for the Washington area, tweeted ridership stats on Obama’s inaugurations in 2013 and 2009, and President George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2005, as well as Trump’s inauguration on Friday was the lowest, at 193,000 trips.
In the end why does it matter?President Trump had a large and passionate crowd watch him take the oath of office. So, what if the crowd was not as big as the 2009 crowd that watched history as President Obama took the oath of office.
What does it matter if yesterday’s Woman’s March on Washington, did or didn’t have a bigger crowd?
Size doesn’t matter, but substance does. If President Trump executes his agenda and passes the types of legislation, he promised during the campaign then how many people saw him take the oath of office is meaningless.
If we start sweating the small stuff like crowd sizes, then the biggest issues could be lost in the shuffle, so it’s time to get to work and off the crowd issue.
Quotes from ASSOCIATED PRESS and the video NBC
