Local News
VIDEO: Around the world, 5 million gathered in unison for the Women’s March to oppose Trump
March leads to wacky press conference,
which leads to phrase “alternative facts”
Not just in the U.S., but across the globe, people gathered in hundreds of cities Saturday to protest the election of Donald Trump and his administration’s policies as part of the Women’s March.
Reports of around 5 million people protested in every state in the U.S. and beyond, including Antarctica and multiple cities in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Estimates in Washington, D.C., were around 500,000.
In Madison, police estimated between 75,000-100,000 people protested, while numbers in St. Paul hovered between 90,000-100,000.
Two overlying themes, aside from the obvious mass protest to Trump’s inauguration, were that no arrests were made – in Washington, Madison or St. Paul – during the peaceful protests, which was not the case Saturday in D.C., and that estimated numbers in nearly every city swelled beyond expectations.
It doesn’t end there, however. The Women’s March website has begun a plan of action for the next 100 days with the first step being writing Senators.
The Madison rally numbers rivaled that of protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 anti-union legislation in 2011.
In Chicago, estimates came in around 250,000 and the march had to be cancelled because of the huge crowds. Protesters gathered in Grant Park and the surrounding areas.
The estimates in New York range between 200,000-500,000, as some headed up Fifth Ave. toward Trump Tower. Los Angeles came in between 200,000-750,000, while another 250,000 rallied in Boston.
UConn professor Jeremy Pressman has a running tally of crowd estimates in the U.S. in this Google doc, which brings U.S. totals between 3.3 million and 4.6 million protesters.
Beyond the borders, in the UK, between 80,000-100,000 joined the Women’s March on London, raising banners, flags and their voices against Trump. And, another 14 marches took place in towns and cities including Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds and Belfast the Guardian reported.
Even in Antarctica they protested. Around 30 eco-minded tourists and non-government scientists aboard a ship in international waters hoisted signs saying “Penguins for peace” and “Seals for science,” organizers said.
Saturday, instead of acknowledging the protests, Donald Trump, at CIA headquarters, said the “dishonest media” underestimated the numbers of his inauguration.
“It looked honestly – it looked like a million and a half people,” said Trump, who wouldn’t have been able to see the grounds on a foggy afternoon. “Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turn on the thing, 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.”
The 250,000 estimate could have come from, literally, the amount of tickets printed, according to Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies website, or it may have come from Dan Gross, who helped coordinate at Barack Obama’s 2012 inauguration.
Analyst Keith Still, a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, estimated Trump’s crowd on the National Mall on Friday to be about one-third the size of Obama’s 2009 inauguration, according to the New York Times.
Whatever the number, pictures show a different story, though Trump said of the media reports, “So, we caught them. And we caught them in a beauty and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
Trump made the National Parks Service pay a price for retweeting a comparison picture between Obama and Trump inauguration crowds on the National Mall – which the parks services manages. Trump’s administration ordered the parks service to stop using its Twitter account and deleted the retweet.
The parks service has since apologized to Trump for the “mistake” of retweeting two comparison pictures on the site of its own park.
Since the inauguration, Trump’s White House Press Sec. Sean Spicer and senior aide Kellyanne Conway have been on the offensive.
Late Saturday, Spicer called the new White House’s first-ever press conference to complain about inauguration coverage, saying the reports “to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”
Spicer didn’t take questions and gave excuses as to why the inauguration numbers were either low or were reported as such. His reasons, however, were immediately criticized as either completely false or vague/misleading, as both CNN, the Washington Post and others reported.
Following up Spicer’s presser, on Sunday Conway was on Meet the Press defending the press secretary, saying he was giving “alternative facts,” which may be an early candidate for word/phrase of 2017 (2016’s word of the year from Oxford Dictionaries was post-truth).
Host Chuck Todd immediately questioned Conway’s remark, saying “Alternative facts? Four of the five facts (Spicer) uttered, the one thing he got right … Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”
Trump didn’t acknowledge the 2-million-plus people protesting his election Saturday around the globe, but he did take to Twitter on Sunday.
Around 7 a.m. he wrote, “Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”
Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017
And hour and a half later – after a Tweet about how more people watched his inauguration than four years ago – Trump added, “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.”
