Officials at the National Park Service are concerned they may become caught up in President-elect Donald Trump’s claims about crowd sizes in connection to his January 20 inauguration.
The last time around, in 2017, acting National Park Service Director Mike Reynolds got a call from Trump the day after the inauguration. Trump made clear that he was displeased with the photos published by the press indicating that the crowd attending his inauguration was smaller than that of former President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, two people aware of the call told Reuters.
Reynolds and the Park Service were ordered to hand out new photos to change the view that Trump’s crowd was smaller than Obama’s. The Park Service subsequently sent new images to the White House.
The issue of crowd size is expected to come up again as Trump’s second inauguration gets underway on Monday. There are concerns within the Park Service that the agency might be caught in the middle of a controversy over the number of attendees, according to an individual familiar with the thinking inside the agency, Reuters reported.
“The team is putting the finishing touches together for what will be an unforgettable string of events. The Inaugural events will draw supporters, industry leaders, and diplomats of all backgrounds to Washington DC,” the communications director of the inaugural committee, Rachel Reisner, told the news agency in a statement.
Following a lawsuit against the Park Service because of its estimate of the crowd size at the 1995 political protest the Million Man March, the service stopped giving estimates the following year.
While the service will be taking photos on Monday, it will not be for crowd size estimates. Press outlets have been given permission to take photographs from the top of the Washington Monument at the center of the National Mall.
Experts estimate that between 800,000 and 1 million people attended Obama’s 2009 inauguration, compared to about a third of that for Trump in 2017. President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration was smaller amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Trump has remained obsessed with crowd sizes, repeatedly claiming that his rally crowds were larger than that of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign.
Those attending the inauguration come from all over the country, at times bussed in by political groups supporting the president.
Crowd scientist and University of Suffolk visiting professor Keith Still analyzed Trump’s inaugural crowd in real time, and will be doing so during next week’s ceremony. He uses aerial photographs to come up with an estimate using Google Earth. He calculates the area that a crowd takes up, and the number of people taking up the area of a square yard. He also looks at the number of people riding the Washington metro, the size of the lines at entry points to the mall, how quickly space on the mall is taken up, as well as parking lot occupancy.
In 2017, Trump pushed his first White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, to tell reporters the day after the inauguration that “this was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
Spicer pointed to figures that he later admitted were inaccurate, claiming that 720,000 people were at the inauguration.
The day after the inauguration, Trump spoke at the headquarters of the CIA, claiming that the crowd appeared to be “a million and a half people.”
The draft permit application put together by the Park Service for Monday’s ceremony at the mall currently has a placeholder estimate of half a million people to be on the National Mall, according to a copy viewed by Reuters.
The same placeholder number was sent to Trump’s inaugural committee in 2017 with the final permitted number being between 750,000 and 1 million people.
