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WITH THE EYES of the world on Washington DC today for the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, many people took to comparing the crowd sizes from today with during President Barack Obama’s first inauguration.
In the pictures that were shared, it didn’t seem that Trump’s crowd fared particularly well.
In this widely shared tweet from New York Times correspondent Binyamin Appelbaum, the crowds along the National Mall are shown to have stretched back significantly further in 2009 compared to today.
Appelbaum said that both images were taken at roughly the same time on both days, about 6 hours before the swearing-in at 11.15 am local-time.
We did our own crowd size comparison from inauguration days 2009 and 2017 and found that there’s certainly a significant difference between two.
Although perhaps not as much as it seems in Appelbaum’s pictures.
2017
2009
Speaking about Trump’s crowd, veteran US reporter Bob Schieffer of CBS News said the mall was:
“Far from being filled in. But it’s still a good-sized crowd.”
Crowd sizes
Estimating crowd sizes is a notoriously difficult thing to do and experts often disagree about the final results.
As The Atlantic points out, Arizona State University and the DC government both used the same satellite footage to get a figure for the numbers at Obama’s first inauguration.
The first estimate came to 1.1 million and the second came to 1.8 million people.
It’s too early to put a definitive figure on the how many people attended Trump’s inauguration, but the first estimates have been made.
We also draw some conclusions in other ways.
Transit officials tweeted the number of people who rode public transport before 11am on the various inauguration days since 2005.
The concluded that there were 513,000 trips taken on Obama’s inaugural day and 193,000 today.
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Is that all?! If they got at Denis they would shake that out of his back pocket.
10m is a pittance. Does that even cover the cost of CAB?
Imagine how much they’d get if they went after the bankers
Great to hear that the CAB are doing great work, hopefully there will be no political interference when ,not if they go after politicians. O; I almost forgot about garda commissioners getting late night visits.
None from any ‘good’ republicans, or even ‘bad’ ones?
I fcuking didn’t. I hate the way they say Irish people. We won’t see a penny of it. Yet we still have to pay for it.
Yeah I don’t think the mean individuals..
Do you actually suggest that the €4m should have been divided and returned in cash to the population of ireland.
i.e. a cheque for less than €1 each?
And in your opinion would that be a better approach than, say, adding a ward of new beds in a hospital and manning them for a year?
Or improving a few accident black spots around the country?
What about our money that was criminally taken by unsecured bondholders and the ECB. The figures from that HEIST would make 4 million look like small change.
Big swinging m€&!?y 4million back to the exchequer, I’m sure multiples of that were spent in its collection.
The Irish people DID NOT get back almost €4 million worth of dirty money in 2014 as that money probably went to the friends and lobbyists of the government, they had a good time with that money…
have your say