Donald Trump says DC hotels are sold out for his inauguration. Expedia says otherwise.

| 12:47 pm EST January 19, 2017
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If you’ve been paying attention, you know by now that Donald Trump’s inauguration is set to be one of the most poorly attended, and heavily boycotted of the modern era. He can’t get musical performers, and reportedly hiring seat fillers to cover for the lack of audience attendance. But his press secretary Sean Spicer is insisting that hotels around the inauguration are sold out because of just how many people are attending. One little problem: hotel booking sites tell a very different story.

Leading hotel booking site Expedia currently states show that there are twenty-four hotels in downtown Washington DC, near the inauguration site, available for tonight. And tomorrow night there are eleven hotels available, despite it being a weekend. In other words, there’s no real rush for hotels near the Lincoln Memorial at all. Remarkably, with tens of thousands of protesters expected to descend on DC for a march on Saturday, and many of them having presumably booked downtown DC hotels, it points to even fewer bookings for inauguration attendees; between the attendees and the protesters, the hotels still haven’t sold out.

We checked, and there’s even availability for tonight at the Watergate Hotel. Considering Trump’s mounting scandals, that seems fitting.