How Many People Watched The Inauguration? Latest Update Shows Trump's TV Ratings Second Highest Since Reagan

The TV ratings for President Donald Trump's inauguration were good, but probably not as good as the new leader of the free world would like. An estimated 31 million people watched the event in the U.S., according to Nielsen, the firm known for tracking television ratings.

That trailed the first inauguration for former President Barack Obama. A whopping 37 million people watched his 2009 event. A president's first inauguration typically draws more viewers, since the event is welcoming a new president. The first inaugurations for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both drew about 29 million viewers, just trailing Trump. Trump's ratings were the second-highest in 36 years, dating back to the inauguration for President Ronald Reagan, which drew nearly 42 million viewers.

Fox News had an especially large audience for the inauguration. It averaged about 8.8 million viewers throughout the day, topping out at about 11 million viewers during the swearing-in ceremony, according to Entertainment Weekly.

The number of folks watching the inauguration events has become a topic of heavy discussion after Trump's team pushed back against the notion that his event was poorly attended in Washington, D.C. Side-by-side photos of Trump's inauguration vs. Obama's showed large swaths of empty fields in 2017 against packed crowds in '09, when about 1.8 million showed up.

In his first meeting as president with the intelligence community at CIA headquarters, Trump boasted about the crowd size. "It looked like a million, a million and a half people," Trump said, falsely saying the crowd stretched to the Washington Monument. The media was to blame for the discrepancy in reports of attendance, he added.

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

Trump's Press Secretary Sean Spicer, meanwhile, has drawn widespread mockery online for an angry press conference where he made similar claims. "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe," he said falsely.

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway later stated these were simply "alternative facts."