His inauguration was the first one in history to attract protesters. Eight thousand antiwar protesters came to Washington on Inauguration Day in 1969. Four years later, Nixon won a landslide reelection victory over Senator George McGovern, who ran as an antiwar Democratic nominee with the Vietnam War still raging. Nixon’s second inauguration drew a hundred thousand protesters to Washington. The next inauguration protest was in 2017, when Donald Trump’s inauguration was followed by at least half a million protesters in Washington and millions more in all fifty states and around the world.
