Trump's State Of The Union Audience Down By About 21%

(The photo above is from CNN.)

It looks like the American people may be tired of hearing Donald Trump's lies. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the audience for the televised State of the Union speech was about 21% less than it had been for the 2019.

Trump's base was watching, as the audience who watched at Fox News was up. The audience for all other news outlets was down.

Here's how it was reported:

The State of the Union address drew a considerably smaller audience than it did a year ago.

President Trump's address and the Democratic response averaged 33.67 million viewers from 9 to 10:30 p.m. ET on broadcast networks ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC and cable news channels CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. Viewing on PBS, Univision, Telemundo, Fox Business and CNNe raised the total to 37.17 million, according to Nielsen figures. That's down about 21 percent from the total of 46.79 million in 2019.

Fox News drew the largest audience of any single network by a wide margin and was the only outlet among those seven to increase its audience from a year ago. The other networks were all off by a good amount.

Fox News averaged 11.55 million viewers for the address, up about 2.5 percent from 11.27 million last year. NBC topped the broadcast networks with 4.8 million viewers (down from 7.14 million in 2019), followed by CBS with 4.66 million (vs. 6.68 million in 2019), ABC with 4.12 million (vs. 5.91 million) and Fox with 3.51 million (vs. 4.2 million). The combined audience on the four broadcast networks fell by 28.5 percent year to year.

CNN drew 2.79 million viewers, down from 3.47 million a year ago, and MSNBC trailed with 2.24 million viewers, vs. 3.79 million in 2019.

Trump's SOTU Audience Was Smaller Than Last 3 Presidents

Trump is once again showing his complete lack of regard for the truth. He is claiming that the audience for his first State of the Union speech was the "highest in history". That is just more of his alternate facts, and not representative of the real facts.

The chart above shows the Nielsen ratings for the first State of the Union speech by Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. Note that he had the smallest audience of any of these four presidents -- 200,000 less than Clinton, 6,200,000 less than Bush, and 2,400,000 less than Obama.

Even in his last year's speech to Congress (which was not really a State of the Union since he had just taken office) he finished third to Clinton and Obama -- beating only the first speech of Bush.

This is reminiscent of his claims about having the largest inauguration crowd in history, when government photos  show that was not even close to the truth. He also claimed to have the largest electoral college win, but history shows us that several presidents have had larger victories.

Trump is a narcissist, and his narcissism demands that he be first (or best) in everything. Unfortunately for him, the facts have never come up to his ludicrous claims and wishes.