Donald Trump firmly believed that he alone could fix the current malaise the Republican Party finds itself in just two months out from the midterms. And so he put himself as the centerpiece for the Republican midterm convention that opened Wednesday night.
Well, the ratings are in, and the numbers aren’t good for a White House that’s curiously decided to attack earlier in the week the one media outlet it most desperately needs. And Trump just delivered a pile of steaming dog shit that has to have network executives wondering if airing him is worth it, because the numbers strongly suggest they don't.
Trump’s Wednesday night convention speech was aired exclusively on Fox News, from the first word to the last. For nearly two hours, the president had the biggest cable news audience in the country all to himself, and 2.5 million people tuned in. That might seem like a big number, and any other cable news outlet would yell that from their corporate boardrooms. But for Fox News? Meh.
Fox News averaged 2.6 million in primetime over the summer. Wednesday, with the president on for nearly two hours and the rest of the dial clear, the network's full primetime came in at 2.3 million. Hour for hour, Trump beat what Hannity normally draws at 9 by a rounding error and failed to improve on what Gutfeld draws at 10. Putting the president on exclusively got Fox News a normal night, and not a good one.
I’ve read a lot of Fox News ratings releases over the years, and the one that went out Thursday afternoon was crafted by someone who understands the assignment. It says the network beat the cable news competition combined, which Fox News has done on more or less every night since I started covering the cable news ratings racket. It touts a 65 percent share of cable news at 9 p.m., which sounds impressive as hell until you remember the network ran a share around 60 percent for the whole month of August with nothing special on. Nothing in the release is wrong, but it almost reads like a subtweet of a massively underperforming speech that they went all in to hype and cover, and ended up with a flat-out dud.
The Trump speech topped out at 2.8 million viewers. By comparison, just two weeks earlier, Watters pulled 3.4 million for an interview with Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate running for Senate in Michigan, the same guy the convention spent Wednesday night attacking by name. El-Sayed on Fox News drew 600,000 more people than the president did at his best moment on Fox News. When I texted a former cable news exec that’s fluent in ratings about what looked to me like brutal ratings, the one-word response was “DISASTER.”
One might assume viewers went over to CNN or MS NOW to hear about the convention from somebody else, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. CNN drew 441,000 during the speech, well below its August average of 624,000, and MS NOW sat at a million viewers, which is where it always sits. It sure looks like no one went looking for a second opinion on the convention. Fewer people cared to watch Trump give his same old speech for the umpteenth time than watch Watters and Hannity play the hits.
Trump reads overnight ratings and has been obsessed with them ever since The Apprentice. The president knew he was up against an NFL season opener that was a Super Bowl rematch, and the scheduling of a GOP midterm convention reeks of abject incompetence by Susie Wiles and the White House comms team. But the numbers are the numbers, and there is no way to spin this in a way that’s favorable to Trump, in the same way high gas prices and inflation can not be blamed on the prior administration.
The Fox News audience is the one thing Trump has never had to work for. While everyone else has drifted at some point over ten years, hardcore Trump fans, for the most part, have stayed with the network that’s been happy to give them what they want, and please Trump along the way. On Wednesday, the network cleared its programming slate for him, and Fox News viewers metaphorically yawned and went to bed. Given how network execs are incredibly skilled at delivering programming their viewers want? This is an unmitigated political disaster for a president with record-low approval ratings.
I’ll grant that this is just Wednesday against the NFL, and somebody at the White House or RNC has almost certainly made that point already. But this president has had this network essentially to himself for a decade, and he shouldn’t need a lucky night to do better than the network's summer average. Sure feels like the Trump show is coming to an end, and not with a bang but a whimper.
VOTE early! Make your vote count.
Airing drumpf AT ANY TIME by ANY NETWORK is a lose-lose situation, especially now with issues in Iran, Canada and tariffs (drumpf is an idiot) our own defense department, Bessent, Vance and nutlick (Lutnick) making things worse by the second. Drumpf is out of his cotton picking mind, why do these stupid networks keep glorifying his bullshit?