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Donald Trump’s diminishing power as a ratings draw was on full display on Tuesday night. Even though the corporate media endlessly hyped the speech, Trump drew his smallest viewership number ever for a State Of The Union style address.
Donald Trump‘s address to Congress reached an average of 36.6 million viewers on Monday.
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Trump didn’t manage to draw as large an audience as he did with any of his State of the Union addresses during his first term as president. His 2017 address reached 47.7 million viewers, followed by 45.6 million in 2018, 46.8 in 2019 and 37.2 million in 2020.
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Older viewers made up a significant majority of Trump’s audience. Nielsen notes that 70.7% of viewers were aged 55 or older, with 20.5% being 35-54 and 5.7% being 18-34.
Traditionally, viewership erodes for these sorts of speeches as a president’s term goes on. If Trump holds to the statistical pattern, his viewership numbers will continue to drop.
Trump’s speech was a total mess. The president rambled for an hour and forty minutes, much of it spent blaming Joe Biden and rehashing old campaign lines.
When the viewership by network numbers are released, expect a huge number for Fox News and the rest of the networks to fare relatively poorly. Younger viewers made up less than 6% of the audience for Trump’s speech, whose viewership was dominated by older Americans.
Americans age 18-54 appear to have solidly tuned Trump out.
It was a bad speech by a bad president whose shelf life appears to have expired. If this is the high water mark for Trump 2.0, Republicans better prepare themselves for some very tough sledding over the next three-plus years.
What do you think about Trump’s ratings? Share your thoughts in the comments below.