Former President Barack Obama has finally broken his MAGA 2.0 silence, reminding a sold-out crowd that his first inauguration turnout trumped the sitting president’s.
Obama, 63, refrained from mentioning President Donald Trump by name, but made clear who he was referring to during an on-stage question-and-answer session in Connecticut, which did not permit news cameras to record.
“In 2020, one person won the election, and it wasn’t the guy complaining about it,” Obama said Tuesday, according to local media. “And that’s just a fact, just like [the fact that] my inauguration had more people. I say that, by the way, not because—I don’t care, but facts are important.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The White House fired back in a statement to the Daily Beast on Wednesday.
“Barack Obama should spend less time whining about his total lack of relevance and more time figuring out why the Democratic Party’s approval ratings are at historic lows,” said White House Assistant Press Secretary Liz Huston.
Media estimates, including those from The New York Times, projected that Trump’s inauguration crowd in 2017 was around 600,000 people—about a third of the size of Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. That has not stopped Trump from repeatedly claiming that his inauguration was the largest ever, with perhaps “a million and a half” people in attendance.
Trump’s claim was debunked by Metro ridership. As of 11 a.m. on Inauguration Day in 2017, there were just 193,000 trips taken, according to the Associated Press. At the same hour in 2009, for Obama, there had been 513,000 trips. Four years prior, there were 197,000 at 11 a.m. for President George W. Bush’s second inauguration.
Trump’s most recent inauguration was held in the Capitol Rotunda, with a limited crowd that prioritized the ultra-wealthy over everyday MAGA supporters, as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg stood shoulder to shoulder at it. Trump’s camp said it moved the ceremony indoors because of the bitter cold, but critics hypothesized it was to avoid the possibility of an embarrassingly small turnout.
Tuesday night was not the first time Obama ribbed Trump over his obsession with crowd sizes. He did the same at the Democratic National Convention last summer.
Obama said more explicitly then, “Here’s a 78‑year‑old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala. There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes. It just goes on and on and on.”
That grilling came when Trump, now 79, was still a presidential candidate, not president. The subtlety in Obama’s most recent comments may be due to an unspoken rule among ex-presidents, which dictates that they avoid criticizing the sitting commander-in-chief publicly. Trump, of course, did not offer the same grace to Joe Biden during his one-term presidency.
The Hartford Courant reported that Obama did not utter Trump’s name once during his appearance on stage with Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian. He did allude to Trump’s war on facts, however, describing it as a threat to Democracy.
“You just have to flood the zone with so much untruth, constantly, that at some point, people don’t believe anything,” Obama said. “So it doesn’t matter if a candidate running for office just is constantly—just hypothetically—saying untrue things. Or if an elected president claims that he won when he lost, and that the system was rigged. But then, when he wins, that it isn’t rigged—because he won. It doesn’t matter if everybody believes it. It just matters if everybody starts kind of throwing up their hands and saying, ‘Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.’ And that’s what’s happening.”
Obama, who actively campaigned for former Vice President Kamala Harris, has been mostly mum since Trump returned to office on Jan. 20. Obama has been criticized for his silence as Trump’s controversial policies—such as ICE crackdowns, ever-changing tariffs, and DOGE cuts that cost thousands of American jobs—have sowed chaos.
The former president spoke out in a lengthy post this week on the 13th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which he created by executive order.
“DACA was an example of how we can be a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws,” Obama said of the program, which provides undocumented immigrants who grew up in the United States temporary protection from deportation. “And it’s an example worth remembering today, when families with similar backgrounds who just want to live, work, and support their communities, are being demonized and treated as enemies.”
