Yes, Trump watched the Women's Marches, and yes, he tweeted about it
Donald Trump rose to global fame thanks to his reality TV career. Now as president of the United States, he remains fixated on the small screen.
President Trump on Sunday morning touted the Nielsen ratings for live TV coverage of his Jan. 20 inauguration. He did so right after tweeting critically about the demonstrators who poured into cities worldwide on Saturday, in part to challenge Trump's agenda and his misogynistic, xenophobic and anti-science remarks.
Trump said he watched the Women's Marches, but he questioned why the demonstrators didn't bother to vote last November. In fact, 48.2 percent of U.S. voters chose Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, versus 46.2 percent for Trump.
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Women's March organizers estimated some 500,000 participants turned up in Washington on Saturday, about double their initial predictions. Worldwide, millions of people are estimated to have turned out in solidarity.
The president later struck a more conciliatory tone from his personal Twitter account, calling peaceful protests a "hallmark of our democracy."
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He also took the time to tweet about the amount of interest in his swearing-in ceremony and related inaugural events.
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Nearly 31 million viewers watched live U.S. TV coverage of Trump's presidential inauguration, the ratings firm Nielsen estimated on Saturday. Trump accurately noted that his ratings beat out those of former President Barack Obama's second swearing-in four years ago.
But Trump declined to mention that about 38 million TV viewers tuned into Obama's first inauguration in 2009 -- making it the second-largest audience since former President Ronald Reagan drew 42 million viewers in 1981, according to Nielsen.
Obama drew an average audience of over 20.5 million during his 2013 swearing-in, while about 25 million people watched Reagan take his second oath of office in 1985.
As women and men demonstrated on Saturday from Washington all the way to Antarctica, Trump falsely claimed that "a million, a million and a half people" turned up to his Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, later accused the media of understating the amount of turn-out last week.
While the exact size of Friday's crowd may never be known -- the National Park Service stopped providing estimates in the 1990s -- photos of the National Mall and ridership on Washington's Metro suggest a couple hundred thousand people turned up for Trump's first day in office.
Topics Barack Obama Donald Trump
Maria Gallucci was a Science Reporter at Mashable. She was previously the energy and environment reporter at International Business Times; features editor of Makeshift magazine; clean economy reporter for InsideClimate News; and a correspondent in Mexico City until 2011. Maria holds degrees in journalism and Spanish from Ohio University's Honors Tutorial College.
