"This started out tonight being a small little concert, and then we had the idea maybe we’ll do it in front of the Lincoln Memorial," he said. "I don’t know if it’s ever been done before. But if it has, very seldom. And the people came by the thousands and thousands, and here we are tonight, all the way back."
As
Buzzfeed reports, he later doubled-down on his claims at an event that night, claiming "tens of thousands of people were there" and that "they never had so many people."
But as many were quick to point out, the concert's turnout didn't appear to be quite as incredible as Trump was making it out to be — nor was he the first person even in recent history to hold his inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial. (George W. Bush did it in 2001 and Barack Obama did it in 2009.) In fact, a visual comparison of Obama's inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 2009 versus Trump's inaugural concert on Thursday seems to suggest that his turnout was actually comparatively quite low.
While the National Park Service has not yet released an estimate of how many were in attendance on Thursday,
Buzzfeed puts the number at around 10,000 people. Meanwhile, Obama's first inaugural concert drew an estimated
400,000.
