With the start of the swearing in ceremonies at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration proper being about 20 minutes away, the pool feed used by all of the major television news organizations switched to an overhead shot of the National Mall. In that moment, something was a bit conspicuous, which quickly got pointed out by both television anchors and members of the news media on Twitter: There were clearly a lot less people there than had been anticipated.

2009:

2017:

On MSNBC, the anchors immediately took notice. “We do see a lot of white space there,” said Brian Williams. “That white space there gives you a good way of measuring how many people are gonna [unintelligible].” Rachel Maddow then chimed in, noting that no tickets were required to watch the inauguration from the National Mall.

“If people want to see this, this is the time for them to be getting there,” she added. “Some inaugurations are big, some inaugurations are small. One of the things that is unpredictable about our news president is that he does seem to be ratings-focused, and he likes to talk about the size of his support, the number of supporters, the number of people at his rallies. It’ll be interesting to see if this bothers him, how he reacts to this, if he does, in the end, have an unusually small inauguration.”

There are still hundreds of thousands of people there, but from the looks of the National Mall, those planning how to manage the crowd were seemingly expecting more.

Update 11:52 a.m. ET: Thanks to commenter “leftynyc” for pointing out that the National Mall has a live webcam that will let you follow the crowd back there, which is filling in a little bit more.

Update 12:05 p.m. ET: Right as Trump was about to be sworn in (note the time and date stamp in the lower left corner), the webcam was turned around. As noted above, it had been showing the white space in the crowd:

Update 12:15 p.m. ET: Now they turned it back around after the crowd filled in more:

UPDATE 12:55 PM ET: Over on Twitter, there was some reaction to the attendance of the inauguration:

Crowd at Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Crowd at Trump’s inauguration today. pic.twitter.com/zZvTFiodXI

— Joon Lee (@iamjoonlee) January 20, 2017

Crowd at the inauguration looks thin today but, remember, attendance at all kinds of malls is down over the last decade.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) January 20, 2017

"Crowds" line DC streets for #TrumpInauguration. pic.twitter.com/HdELnSfJc5

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) January 20, 2017

Crowd count is in:
Trump 2017: 250,000
Obama 2013: 1,000,000
Obama 2009: 1,800,000#Inauguration

— Dan Gross (@DanJGross) January 20, 2017

we get it. Trump didn’t draw a big crowd. Im’ sure he’ll be upset about it as he runs the country and undoes Obama’s agenda.

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) January 20, 2017

Oh, God. We're going to have Mall headcount truthers, aren't we?

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 20, 2017

[Photo: ABC News screen grab]

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