Donald Trump’s ratings take a tumble
The media’s main draw for helping out Donald Trump, apart from what tax cuts he’ll provide their producers and CEOs, is that the guy was a massive ratings draw from 2016 right to the beginning of 2021, when he infamously refused to accept that he lost the 2020 election. That’s why they kept him in the news in the years since – even while still refusing to fact check anything he says.
The four years in which he was gone also led to a substantial drop in both cable news viewing and newspaper subscriptions, largely because people were no longer living in dread of each hour as if there was a new existential crisis, like Donald Trump somehow getting us into a war with Iran or North Korea.
However, no such ratings boom has returned – if we’re to look at the numbers of Donald Trump’s inauguration – a meagerly attended event already due to the Arctic storm that hit Washington, he only drew in around 24 million viewers. That’s ten million fewer viewers than watched President Biden be sworn in back in 2021 – and even seven million fewer people than watched Trump’s first inauguration back in 2017 – making it one of the lowest rated inaugurations in history.
Despite his determination to seem more powerful than ever (one that the media is amping up so they can create the same sort of cliffhangers to get people to turn in that worked back in 2017 and 2018,) the opposite is true – for the tired old guy who’s even less coherent than he was the day before yesterday.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making