Trump Mocks Saturday Demonstrations Before Calling Peaceful Protests 'Hallmark' of Democracy

WASHINGTON — 

U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday mocked the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out the day before in cities across the country to protest his new administration.

"Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!" Trump said in a Twitter message from the White House, his home for the next four years. "Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly."

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem, pop artist Madonna, actress Scarlett Johansson and other prominent figures led Saturday's Women's March on Washington as a rebuke to Trump's inauguration as the country's 45th president on Friday.

WATCH: Gloria Steinem addresses Women's March

Two hours later, Trump said in another tweet, "Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don't always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views."

Trump also boasted about the number of people who watched his inaugural on television, saying, "Wow, television ratings just out: 31 million people watched the Inauguration, 11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!"

The Nielsen television rating service said the 30.6 million who watched Trump's ascent to power topped the 20.6 million figure for former President Barack Obama's inauguration to a second term in 2013, but fell 19 percent short of the 37.8 million who watched Obama's first inauguration in 2009. More Americans typically watch inaugurations when a new president takes office, with the biggest number - 41.8 million - recorded in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated for the first of his two terms.

Crowd estimates

Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul turned Republican politician, said on a visit Saturday to the Central Intelligence Agency that the news media lied about the size of the crowd that watched him assume power. Numerous media outlets in the U.S. showed vast swaths of the National Mall vacant as he was sworn into office, compared to 2009 pictures of shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at Obama's first swearing-in ceremony.

President Donald Trump speaks to the crowd in front of the Capitol during his inaugural address. January 20, 2017 (B. Allen / VOA)

U.S. officials do not make official crowd estimates, but the new president claimed — wrongly — that Friday's crowd stretched down the mall from the Capitol, where he was sworn in, to the Washington Monument, the obelisk paying homage to the country's first president, George Washington.

Trump, apparently worried about attempts to deligitimize his presidency, said one television network showed "an empty field" and reported that he drew just 250,000 people to his inauguration.

“We had a massive field of people, you saw that. Packed,” Trump said at the CIA. “I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks and they show ... an empty field. I said, wait a minute, I made a speech! I looked out, the field was ... it looked like a million, a million-and-a-half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, 'Donald Trump did not draw well!'

Trump said, "It’s a lie. We caught [the media]. We caught them in a beauty."

Later, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe," moments after declaring that "no one had numbers" because the government years ago stopped making crowd estimates for large gatherings on the mall.

Trump throughout his unlikely run to the White House has regularly disparaged media accounts about him. For weeks after his election, he dismissed conclusions reached by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had meddled in the election in an effort to help him win, only acknowledging shortly before his inauguration that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered hacking into the computer of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta.

The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks released thousands of Podesta's emails in the month before the election, many of them revealing embarrassing details of how Democratic operatives helped Clinton win the Democratic presidential nomination over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

CIA visit

Trump, on his visit to the CIA, attempted to make amends for his initial rejection of its conclusion about Russian interference in the election, telling intelligence workers, “I am so behind you.”

“I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you wanted and you’re going to get so much backing. Maybe you’re going to say, ‘please, don’t give us so much backing,' ” the newly sworn-in leader said, prompting laughter.

Trump lost the national popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November election by nearly three million votes, but won where it mattered, in the Electoral College, where state-by-state outcomes determine U.S. presidential contests.