Was Donald Trump's inauguration crowd big or small? The (unimportant) question became a huge issue during the first week of Trump's presidency largely thanks to the White House's misguided insistence that the crowd was huge when it simply was not. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, there are still people - including Trump himself - clinging to "alternative facts", believing the mainstream media lied about the crowd size to undermine Trump. This is not normal.

There is no such thing as "alternative facts". When things are unclear, we need to use our intelligence, not wishful or paranoid thinking, to figure out and accept what the truth is.

Getting angry over an eagerly-accepted illusion that conforms to one's own preconceived worldview is dysfunctional behavior. Illusions help sustain delusions, as is literally the case here with the crowd size, as you will see.

Infowars/Alex Jones: Facts Destroy MSM's Claim That Trump Had Small Crowd Size

Infowars: CNN Debunks Its Own Claim That Trump Inauguration Was Small (video time 2:40-6:00)

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Trump Crowd Hoax: PROOF the MSM lied about Trumps crowd

The mainstream as well as alternative media needs to do a much better job of killing demonstrable falsehoods and eliminating ambiguities whenever possible, and stop assuming most people are intelligent enough to infer the truth when obvious. We don't have to be polite or rude. We just need to expose the truth and destroy illusions and falsehoods whenever they blatantly exit.

To be sure, there are good, well-thought out, well-researched conspiracy theories out there that do warrant attention. But this thing about the Trump inauguration crowd size is not one of them. We can help it die a quick and complete death that it deserves.

(P.S. The point of this article is not to imply the crowd size itself is an important issue, it is not. The point is to fully expose the illusion, thereby discrediting the dysfunctional mentality and propagandists driving such demonstrably false conspiracy theories.)

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The Controversy

How big was Trump's inauguration crowd? Compared to Obama' 2009 inauguration, considerably smaller:

Trump and his supporters obsessed with optics did not like this at all. This had to be a conspiracy perpetrated by the "fake news" mainstream media in an effort to delegitimatize the new president.

Team Trump was so furious they sent out new Press Secretary Sean Spencer to angrily address the issue in his very first official briefing at the White House the very next day (Jan 21). The half-empty National Mall picture, they argued, did not match what they saw with their own eyes, and thus it had to be a media lie. Trump even personally called the director of National Park Service on the phone asking for more photographs so he could prove this blatant conspiracy against him.

Trump also went on to directly address the issue during his speech at the CIA headquarters that same day:

"But we had a massive field of people.  You saw them.  Packed.  I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field.  I say, wait a minute, I made a speech.  I looked out, the field was -- it looked like a million, 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." [...]

"But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.  And I turn on -- and by mistake I get this network, and it showed an empty field.  And it said we drew 250,000 people.  Now, that’s not bad, but it’s a lie.  We had 250,000 people literally around -- you know, in the little bowl that we constructed.  That was 250,000 people.  The rest of the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, was packed.  So we caught them, and we caught them in a beauty.  And I think they’re going to pay a big price."

Trump and his supporters always knew the mainstream media was dishonest and out to get Trump, and this was their big confirmation.

Additional evidence and fact checking subsequently done by the mainstream media failed to completely quell this conspiracy theory.

• Fact check: Controversy over Trump's inauguration crowd size
• Trump's inauguration crowd: Claims versus evidence

Alex Jones/Infowars for one continues to claim to this day it was all a media lie. This even after seeing the PBS time-lapse video of the Inauguration Day crowd, which Jones chooses to believe was edited to hide the peak size of the crowd.

Somebody needs to do a better job of killing this silly conspiracy theory and expose the real propagandists... So we will.

Vantage Point, Vantage Point, Vantage Point!

Doubters, including the White House, point to this picture (and similar ones) of the inauguration crowd in the National Mall viewed from the Capitol building:

The Mall does look filled with people for the most part. But appearance can be deceiving especially when dealing with such a large space. The distance to the Washington Monument from the cameraman is much larger than you might think: It's about whopping ~2.2 km or ~1.4 miles. (You can read about "lens compression" here.)

Depending on the vantage point, the same space can look vastly different. It's merely due to an optical illusion that the Mall looks like a sea of overflowing people. If the vantage point (cameraman) was a little higher above the ground, this is what you would have seen instead:

All the big empty spaces shown in the "controversial" photo from the top of the Washington Monument are now visible. The higher the vantage point, the more the Mall would look like the half-empty photo (shown below).

Photo Time

It doesn't matter, the doubters would say, because these photos were taken long before or after Trump took the oath of office and gave his inaugural speech, hence the small crowd at the time.

That is false.

Both photos were taken almost exactly at noon (within ~1 minute), at the peak of the inauguration ceremony when Trump was sworn in.

For this one:

We find the following very specific information in a USA Today article published on Jan 24:

“Only one news organization had a still photographer atop the Washington monument for the inauguration and I assigned him to be there,” Bourg wrote on Jan. 22. “This photo by Reuters News Pictures staff photographer Lucas Jackson was taken at 12:01:18 p.m. on Friday and not much earlier as many people are trying to claim.”

(More details in this Reuters article.)

And for this one:

It's even more incontrovertible because it's a screenshot from ABC News' inauguration live coverage which showed the above scene moments before Trump's swearing in ceremony at noon. You can see the whole sequence there yourself in this Youtube video (it should start at video time 1:55:30). To a large degree, this is "smoking gun" evidence.

Well, maybe the place was packed at some point during the day, not at noon, and that's what this photograph (below) show?

No. This PBS time-lapse video shows that's definitely not the case. Besides, in the picture below with a similar vantage point (a bit closer to the Capitol) the Mall does appear similarly packed but we also know this was taken right around noon - i.e. when we know the Mall was not packed at all - because we can see Trump at the podium speaking to the crowd right after taking the oath of office. Illusion vs. reality. Trump was correct in saying that the Mall looked packed. Except it was only an optical illusion.

Simply put, there is absolutely no photographic or video evidence provided by anyone anywhere that shows the National Mall packed with people that's not from a camera with a low vantage point (including the CNN "Gizapixel" image). And it is now a proven fact that the National Mall did have big empty areas during Trump's swearing-in ceremony and speech at noon. End of story.

Except...


Geometric Analysis

Can a crowd this small...

...really appear this big, even if with an optical illusion?

Such a big visual difference it seems. But the answer is, YES, it absolutely can. This can be scientifically proven. All you need is Google Earth and trigonometry (in addition to the photographs). It's just a matter of working out the geometry involved in the low-angle Mall crowd photo above.

First and foremost, we have to know where the cameraman was. He was right there on the Capitol terrace right behind and above Trump:

It is difficult to find the cameraman's exact elevation as the Capitol building's detailed measurements are not available anywhere online (presumably censored by the government for security reasons). But we can still infer it using:

• Google Earth's "elevation" data (= height above sea level)
• The coincidence of the cameraman's terrace being the Capitol's ground level from the perspective of the building's east (back) side

The elevation of the terrace thus measured is ~88 ft or ~26.8 m:

Adding the cameraman's body height (we'll just use the average height of Americans which is 1.77 m), we get ~28.6 m as the approximate eye/camera elevation. (There is no need to be overly precise here as it won't make much of a difference for our purposes.)

Now we take a look at the National Mall and its crowd sections which we will label "A, B, C, D, E...":

Let's focus on section A and the crowd in it, and work out the geometry of the sight line from the Capitol camera. (Note: The ground elevations of the crowd sections will be noted in the diagrams, which you can use to check the calculations. You can also use Google Earth.)

The goal here is to see the extent of the "blind spot", i.e. the area behind the crowd (= height ~1.77 m) that's hidden from the Capitol cameraman. As you can see above, the blind spot does not cover the entire length of the gap between crowd sections A and B. This means part of this gap (green segment) should be visible in photos taken by the Capitol camera. And that is indeed the case:

Let's examine section B:

This time the blind spot does cover the whole length of the gap between the two crowds (B & C). This means no visible gap should appear in the photo, and that is indeed the case:

Next, section C:

Again, and even more so, the blind spot completely covers the gap between the crowds (C & D). We don't see the gap in the photo:

Next up, section D:

The blind spot extends even further into the next crowd (E). Obviously no gap is visible from the perspective of the Capitol cameraman:

Section E is the last crowd in the Mall. The subsequent sections - F, G (& H) - are all empty. This is the huge white, empty area you see in this picture from the Washington Monument:

And yet, in the photo from the Capitol it becomes just a thin, barely noticeable white line:

Conclusion

So there you have it. There is no escaping it: Donald Trump's inauguration was half empty (in the National Mall), "period". That's not an opinion or wishful thinking or propaganda. It's irrefutable fact.

That fact in itself is not important. What's much more important is what this reveals about the people who promoted and/or eagerly believed the silly, blatantly false conspiracy theory. It's like believing in the Flat Earth theory (which inexplicably got popular last year). The lack of rational thinking demonstrated by this is worrisome.

It's more understandable with average people on the internet. But it's quite disturbing with the President of the United States and people like Alex Jones (Infowars) with a huge audience and influence. How much of it is willful lying and how much of it wishful thinking or self-deception? Of course, with Trump, we know who he is; he is who he is and does what he does. And people voted him into the White House knowing this. So it is what it is. But...

As made clear by the example of the inauguration crowd size, the level of intelligence exhibited by the likes of Alex Jones in their conspiracy theories is quite low. They are highly unreliable conspiracy theorists at best, an unofficial propaganda arm for the new establishment now in power at worst. Listen to them and trust them at your own peril. Things are different now, and they may have become the opposite of what they represented. Think twice before you drink the Kook-Aid in Jonestown. Remember: There is truth, and there is everything else. That's not political.

Watch again:

• Infowars/Alex Jones: Facts Destroy MSM's Claim That Trump Had Small Crowd Size
• Infowars: CNN Debunks Its Own Claim That Trump Inauguration Was Small

Either you are with truth, or you are with corruption.

If you liked this article, your appreciation would be appreciated!

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