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Trump Sets a New Record For How Ridiculous a Lie About the Size of Inauguration Crowds Can Be

Just as you might have expected, Donald Trump found a way to claim — AGAIN — that he had the largest inauguration in history. It’s not, of course, and the claim is even more laughable than last time.

Remember last time? When he forced poor Sean Spicer to go out and angrily declare “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, PERIOD!” Good times, good times. And poor Sean had to say all kinds of crazy stuff about the angles of the pictures, and the ground covering, and all manner of nonsense to try and justify Trump’s idiotic claim.

This time around, we knew it would be even crazier, because he has a long [3] history [4] of [5] being [6] obsessed [7] with [8] crowd [9] size [9]. Yes, there are 8 links in that sentence, and those are just chronologically the most recent 8 articles we’ve done on his freakouts.

And it’s not just his obsession that tipped us off that he’d come up with a whopper this time. It’s the fact that he had to move the whole thing indoors [10] because he was afraid his nipples would stick out through his suit jacket from the cold or something.

Anyway, here’s his post from a few days ago, after he finally figured out how he was going to sell this hogwash:

President Donald J. Trump’s Historic Inauguration Sets Viewership Record

Data from Streams Charts shows that due to coverage of President Trump’s Inauguration, the News section of YouTube set a new “All Time Viewership Record” with 9.6 million viewers.

Additionally, the Inaugural Ceremony stream on President Donald J. Trump’s X account received a stunning 36.7 million views.

In combination with TV viewership, an estimated 80.7 million viewers watched the President’s Inauguration, which beats the previous record of 42 million viewers with Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration in 1981.

Okay, where do we start? How about: Nothing but television existed to watch the inauguration in 1981. If we limited Trump’s viewership to the same metric by which we have always gauged television viewers, his share was the lowest since 2013. That’s according to Nielsen [11]. You know, those guys whose job this is.

In fact, here’s the actual breakdown:

That’s 24.6 million total. More than half are viewers age 55 and older. Almost nobody under 35. You can find 1,430,000 people who saw a laundry soap commercial five minutes ago.

Number two, the networks that Nielsen reported on in 1981 was a pretty east thing to find in their archives:

The 2025 ratings, according to the Nielsen website, included ABC, CBS, NBC, Merit Street Media, Telemundo, Univision, CNBC, CNN, CNNe, FOX News Channel, FOX Business Network, MSNBC, Newsmax, NewsNation, and PBS.

So twelve more channels, including two in Spanish, make up Mr. Trump’s TV numbers.

But it’s not just unfair to compare Trump’s numbers to Reagan based on raw data. There’s also the fact that there were 32% fewer people in America at the time of Reagan’s inauguration. As a portion of total Americans who watched either inauguration, Reagan had nearly one in five people in the country, while Trump had about one in fifteen.

I’m still not done.

The streaming services that Trump cites were ALSO not available for previous inaugurations. While YouTube and X (Twitter back then) did exist, there was no TV streaming service available from either, even for Trump’s own last inauguration. They just didn’t exist. YouTube TV wasn’t a thing until 2017. Of COURSE the Inauguration “set a new record” in the News section of YouTube — it’s the first big news event to happen since that existed.

Excuse me while I go set a brand new record for being older than I’ve ever been. Oh, there’s another record I just set for number of breaths taken by me!

What’s more, traffic on X during big events — say, like, the Super Bowl [12] — is estimated to be up to 75% from bots.

So yeah, if the wind is blowing just right and you squint your eyes hard enough, it’s possible that you might not laugh so hard your sides hurt from Trump’s claim that he was being watched by 80 million people. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.

And before you ask… No, Trump actually doesn’t have anything better to do. I feel like he’s pretty much proven that he’s all about image and not action. We’ve got a national emergency with the price of goods in this country, and he’s occupying himself with making sure we don’t accidentally hire too many black people and renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Denali.

Anything to distract.