I was on DC's Metro for last Saturday's counter-Inaugural Women's March-- now estimated to have been three times larger than the crowd for the Inaugural--and can personally testify that people were crammed onto the cars like sardines. The parking lot at RFK Stadium was a sea of buses, reportedly 1200 of them, which is 1000 more than parked there for the previous day's Inaugural. The march itself was delayed in part because even without an anti-abortion contingent there was no room on the streets to march.
I also happened to be on DC's Metro yesterday, the day of the "March for Life". This was an important march for several reasons: the usual anxiety on the part of the ostentatiously or professionally chaste and pious about wasted semen; a friendly new administration lending its voice of support for the cause in the persons of Vice President Pence and Kellyanne Conway; and most importantly, size envy in light of the national conversation about crowd estimates instantiated and sustained by the Envier-In-Chief. Could and would this march rival the one attended 6 days earlier by better than 1% of Americans in events across the country, easily half a million of them in DC alone?
One day later, it's difficult to find an official answer. Plenty of pixels have been spilled discussing the topic on sites sympathetic to the cause, but while many of those articles chide the media for neglect of the story, none that I've seen are reporting specifics that would rationalize their dismay. Mainstream news sites that I've come across searching for an estimate with teeth, are duly reporting on the event while being respectfully, oddly, unaccountably mum on the matter of attendance.
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| From heavy.com |
Estimates of thousands or tens of thousands of attendees are being suggested when the topic is broached, even on tilted sites, and based on crowd photos I don't think that's much of an exaggeration. That's worth a story on Eyewitness News. As an eyewitness myself, however, if I hadn't known there was a march, nothing about my experience would have told me. Seating on Metro was if anything more plentiful than usual for my morning ride. The RFK Stadium parking lot was empty of buses except for half of the small sliver to the right of my inbound train. In the evening I did see a group of about 20 mostly young people with matching buttons, hats and signs on the platform at L'Enfant Plaza waiting for a train to Virginia. I was looking for their cohort.
The question is especially important because Trump has made it so. It's only that much more pleasing that the truth is so not on his side. While he might take satisfaction that his own Inauguration bested yesterday's March in headcount, he continues to get stamped in the forehead with a giant L in the national (and global) popularity contest. He got skunked in the popular vote in November and his face was rubbed into that fact by the dwarfing of his inauguration crowd by the massing of dissenters on the same ground (conveniently enough for visual comparisons) the day after. The trickle of persons in town for yesterday's March though vocally supportive of and hopeful about the new administration, are to my mind, an eloquent illustration of how one week into his misguidedly ambitious administration the new president's numbers are dropping faster than underpants with shot elastic in the waistband. Displeasing numbers should be cause for contemplation. Contemplation is not what Don Trump does. Instead, he stews. Well, keep stewing, Don.
The popular vote is important. The larger the margin between the winner and loser, the less legitimacy the loser of that vote has in claiming victory in the election. Don Trump lost the popular vote to the other major party candidate by 3 million votes -- 2.1% of voters almost as many Americans as those who marched in dissent one week ago today. An actual majority of voters, 54.1%, voted for anyone else. This won't give any pause to him or his enablers or to those his technical victory emboldens in the rolling out of their almost comically insane agenda, but it must never be forgotten by anyone, including Don Trump, that his presidency is illegitimate.
Yes, Don. Size matters. More so the truth.
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