President Donald Trump has bragged that his bizarre Thursday night speech drew a “big audience”—before the numbers had even come out.
Trump, 80, claimed without evidence in a Truth Social post on Friday morning that his primetime speech on “shocking vulnerabilities” in U.S. election security got rave reviews.
“Great reviews on speech last night. Big audience,” he wrote. “Pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!!! Thank you! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
It was unclear what Trump’s post was based on, as TV ratings for his 25-minute address have not yet been released. And going by the views on the White House’s official YouTube channel, he only drew a fraction of primetime audiences.
The livestream of Trump’s speech only garnered about 580,000 views on the White House’s YouTube page as of Friday at noon.
In contrast, at 9 p.m. on Thursday last week, 2.69 million viewers tuned in to ABC’s Press Your Luck, 2.64 million people watched NBC’s The Americas, and 1.14 million followed Fox’s Best Medicine. This means Trump drew only about 8.9 percent, or roughly 1/11, of total viewers in the same time slot last week.
It didn’t help that ABC and NBC declined to air the president’s bonkers address.
Fox aired the speech live in full, while CBS sandwiched it in between loads of fact-checking and context. CBS noted that Trump’s previous statements on election rigging were “false,” and even Fox admitted that it could not verify the accuracy of the president’s claims.
Trump was humiliated even further after the hosts of Fox & Friends, his favorite program, completely snubbed his speech throughout its three-hour runtime on Friday.
MS NOW showed about 15 minutes of the speech before cutting away to dunk on Trump’s claims. CNN refused to air the address live, with anchor Kaitlan Collins citing the president’s “well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections.”
Trump didn’t miss the opportunity to take a swipe at the networks that chose not to air his speech—while he was delivering it.
“In a rare move, NBC and ABC Fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about because of the fact that they don’t like the topic because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it,” he fumed.
“Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” Trump continued. “They use our public multi-billion-dollar-in-value airwaves for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multi-billion-dollar assets. Great damage has been done to our country.”
During his much-hyped speech, Trump declared that “great damage has been done to our country” by nefarious foreign actors and that U.S. elections have been “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen.”
The administration later released a trove of declassified intelligence documents to back up his claims, but much of the information appears to be old and has so far failed to substantiate many of the president’s more serious claims.
