Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration

The National Park Service has released hundreds of official images from Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January that prove, once and for all, that the crowds in attendance were far smaller than those that attended Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Trump’s inauguration in 2017 with Obama’s in 2009, based on the newly released photos:

This Saturday very likely marked the largest day of demonstrations in American history. But Friday’s inauguration had, well, pretty average turnout for a presidential inauguration. And the new administration had a problem with that, as we saw with an alarming series of false statements from President Donald Trump and his press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday.

To try to settle the question of how many people attended the inauguration ceremony on the National Mall in Washington, DC, we reached out to Keith Still, a professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. (He analyzed aerial shots of the crowds of both President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address and President Trump’s for the New York Times.) His conclusion is that the crowd on the Mall on Friday was roughly one-third the size of President Obama’s.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump excoriated the media for — in his view — massively understating the size of his inaugural crowds. “I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field,” Trump said at a speech Saturday afternoon at the CIA. “I’m like, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people.”

The unnamed television network, he noted, estimated a turnout of 250,000 people — a figure he argued was way too low.

Longtime feminist activist Gloria Steinem gave one of the earliest big-name speeches at the Women’s March on Washington, strongly rebuking President Donald Trump.

Steinem slammed Trump for his divisive rhetoric, which has at one point or another offended women and practically every minority group in America. “The Constitution doesn’t begin with, ‘I, the president,’” Steinem said. “It begins with, ‘We, the people.’ So don’t try to divide us!”

Washington, DC’s metro system, WMATA, just keeps throwing shade on President Donald Trump’s poor inauguration attendance.

Here are WMATA’s latest tweets from Saturday — on the Women’s March on Washington, which is, among other things, a stand against Trump’s sexism:

On July 14, 1861 — one week before the first major battle of the American Civil War was fought at Bull Run — a Union soldier named Sullivan Ballou wrote a passionate love letter to his wife, Sarah. He would never send it; Ballou was killed at Bull Run, and the letter was found among his belongings after his death. But his words have lived on, first reaching a wide audience in 1990 when filmmaker Ken Burns featured Ballou’s letter in his seminal documentary The Civil War, and entering the cultural conversation again this week, when Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer quoted Ballou at Friday’s inauguration of President Donald Trump.

In the decades since The Civil War’s debut, Ballou’s letter has worked its way into the annals of pop culture by way of parody. As narrated by actor Paul Roebling over the strains of a weepy folk ballad, the letter is the foundation for the documentary’s most iconic moment: a beautiful message from a fallen soldier to the wife he would never see again, indelibly stamped with Burns’s florid, melodramatic presentation of it.

President Donald Trump’s inaugural address managed an impressive rhetorical feat. It was both a less reassuring picture of America than Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural — delivered on the eve of the Civil War — and more optimistic than JFK’s offer of a “grand global alliance ... that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind.”

Here’s how he managed that: President Trump simultaneously overstated the problems America is facing and understated the difficulty of fixing them.

Among thousands of people ambling toward the US Capitol on Friday, Dallas Horton shares an admission: He is, he says in a quiet voice, one of the key “architects” of Donald Trump’s election.

He wasn’t a Trump staffer, Horton clarifies, and he never worked in politics. He has only met Trump once. But Horton says that at a campaign event in Colorado this October, he told Trump that the Republican nominee needed to soften his rhetoric on immigration to beat Hillary Clinton — and lo and behold, two weeks later Trump said he’d only deport “criminals,” implying that other undocumented immigrants would be allowed to stay.

Since President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977, the presidential parade has become a tradition, with the newly minted president walking part of a one-mile route along Pennsylvania Avenue past supporters crowded into grandstands.

But as you’ll see in the photos below, the attendance Friday along the parade route for President Donald Trump was pretty sparse.

“Today is supposed to be a celebration,” Barbara Queeney told me, “but instead it’s just ... crushing.”

Queeney, a gregarious woman from St. Augustine, Florida, was standing on the sidewalk in downtown Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day, holding a sign that read, “Not Fit, Not Worthy, Not Legitimate.” I asked her why she considered incoming President Donald Trump illegitimate. “He was influenced and aided by a foreign government,” she told me.

If you were paying attention to cable news coverage and social media feeds of anti–Donald Trump protests in Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day, you might have gotten the idea that the nation’s capital city was literally on fire.

Here, for example, is one image that was shared widely on Twitter:

The Women’s March on Washington on Saturday is set to be huge, drawing more charter bus permit applications than the actual Inauguration Day — of President Donald Trump — it’s protesting and more than 220,000 committing to going on Facebook.

In fact, the protests look to be so big that currently airplanes full of women are flying to Washington, DC, to join the demonstrations. Here are some of the images posted on social media so far:

Protests erupted across Washington, DC, on inauguration Friday and police responded with pepper spray, smoke bombs, and flash grenades to disperse the crowds. Police arrested at least 95 people.

Clashes between anti-Trump protesters and law enforcement escalated throughout the day, according to American University Radio reporter Patrick Madden who has been following the demonstrations on the ground.

When Donald Trump was sworn in Friday and replaced Barack Obama as president, there was a shift in addition to the obvious change in administrations.

With Trump as president, Mike Pence as vice president, Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan as House speaker, nearly all of the most powerful political roles in Washington are now filled by straight, white men.

It’s official: Donald Trump has been sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.

To a crowd of hundreds of thousands Trump gave his first inaugural address to the American people after taking the oath of office.

President Donald Trump boasted his inauguration would have an “unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.“

But aerial shots of the National Mall from President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and today show that isn’t likely. Here’s an image taken at about 11:30 AM ET in 2009:

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was the only Democrat with a speaking slot at Donald Trump’s inauguration, and he milked that opportunity for all it was worth, using his few minutes to issue a barely disguised repudiation of the man about to become president.

“My fellow Americans, we live in a challenging and tumultuous time,” he began, striking a nervous tone. And his examples seemed to specifically warn of dangers represented by Trump and his political coalition.

When Hillary Clinton showed up to the inauguration of her former rival Donald Trump on Friday, her outfit made a striking statement. She wore an all-white suit — making a not-so-subtle reference to the women’s suffrage movement.

It’s an especially striking choice on the eve of the Women’s March on Washington, which promises to draw massive crowds of people aiming to remind Trump of the importance of a famous Clinton quote: “Women’s rights are human rights.” The march will also echo another inauguration protest — the 1913 women’s suffrage parade that ended violently, but galvanized support for passing the 19th Amendment that guaranteed women the right to vote in 1920.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic caucus all showed up to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration wearing the same button, a navy blue badge that says #ProtectOurCare.

According to CNN, Pelosi’s office handed out the badges, which reference the Republican attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Pelosi’s spokesperson described the buttons as “a show of solidarity” with the president’s signature health care law, although they don’t mention him by name.

Whether it’s a Republican president or a Democratic president, it doesn’t matter — on Inauguration Day, the loser on the National Mall has been the grass. Hundreds of thousands of people trample on it, destroying its delicate, verdant blades, and costly repairs are then required.

Not this year, reports Sarah Laskow in a fascinating piece at Atlas Obscura. The National Park Service has just finished a $40 million renovation of the Mall that included excavating soil 4 to 5 feet deep, installing a new 250,000-gallon drainage system, replacing the soil with high-tech trample-resistant dirt fortified with sand, and then covering that soil with a special turf blend sourced from a farm in New Jersey. “One thing is sure: The central axis connecting the Capitol to the Washington Monument hasn’t looked this good in decades,” the Washington Post reports. (The Post has a great explainer on the renovations, which you can read here.)

When President Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2009, he promised to “restore science to its rightful place.”

Eight years later, the scientific community is bracing for a considerably more contentious relationship with President-elect Donald Trump. From his loose relationship with facts, to his denial of climate change, his low-opinion of the National Institutes of Health, and his meeting with an anti-vaccine leader, Trump has signaled that his administration will not just challenge proven scientific principles, but also undo the significant science policy progress of President Obama.

When I was a child, my family watched the Rockettes perform on national television every year for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I adored the Rockettes and wanted to be like them. They were so beautiful and talented and perfectly in sync. To me, a Thanksgiving without the Rockettes would have been like a Thanksgiving without turkey — practically un-American! So when I grew up and actually became a Rockette, it was a dream come true.

About 1,200 shows and 240,000 kicks later, I got the call to perform with the Rockettes for the 2001 presidential inauguration of George W. Bush. I nearly fell over. Being a Rockette had already been a wild ride, but an inauguration might be the most spectacular gig ever.