More people watched President Donald Trump’s second inauguration than watched any other inaugural event in history, according to the president.

According to the new commander-in-chief, while his Oath of Office was administered inside the U.S. Capitol Rotunda where only a crowd of several hundred could be seated, almost twice as many Americans virtually witnessed his second term begin when compared to the previous inaugural viewing record.

“Data from Streams Charts shows that due to coverage of President Trump’s Inauguration, the News section of YouTube set a new ‘All Time Viewership Record’ with 9.6 million viewers. Additionally, the Inaugural Ceremony stream on President Donald J. Trump’s X account received a stunning 36.7 million views,” Trump said via his Truth Social media platform.

“In combination with TV viewership, an estimated 80.7 million viewers watched the President’s Inauguration,” Trump wrote.

Trump’s declaration is in keeping with his past history of focusing on crowd size and ratings. In 2016, his White House Press Secretary declared – despite photographic evidence to the contrary – that Trump’s first inaugural crowd “was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

That was, apparently, until this year. Trump says his 2025 Inauguration ratings “beats the previous record of 42 million viewers with Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration in 1981.”

“President Donald J. Trump’s Historic Inauguration Sets Viewership Record,” Trump declared.

While garnering more than 80 million inaugural viewers would indeed be an historic achievement, it appears that Trump is using some shaky figures to arrive at his record-breaking conclusion.

As of Sunday afternoon the view count of Trump’s inauguration presented on his formerly-Twitter account continued its climb and had reached 36.8 million According to information provided by Elon Musk’s social media company their “video view metric is triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds and sees at least 50% of the video player in-view.”

That means there is no way for the commander-in-chief to know how much of his address – beyond a few seconds – any viewer caught from his feed before scrolling on or how often they’ve done so, and that he’s including views which occurred after last Monday’s live event in his total.

Trump is also apparently aggregating the 9.6 million YouTube views pulled by hundreds of streamers and more than a dozen network news feeds carrying the inauguration, despite that service counting views after just 30 seconds of watching.

According to media ratings firm Nielsen, “an estimated 24.6 million viewers tuned in on Monday, January 20, 2025 to watch the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as 47th president of the United States.” That’s down from the 33.8 million the company tracked watching former President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, and also down from the start of Trump’s first term in 2017, when an estimated 31 million people tuned in. Former President Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration drew an estimated 41.8 million live viewers.

However, Nielsen also reports that Trump’s 2025 TV viewership jumped to “34.4 million viewers” for a short time “during the 12:15 PM quarter-hour.”

It appears that this peak TV audience figure is the number, along with and including social media scroll-through counts and partial steaming views, which the re-ascendant president is using to arrive at his theoretically-historic 80.7 million viewer total.

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