Well, that didn’t take long.
Less than 48 hours after delivering the State of the Union, President Trump undercut that real success with incredibly silly overstatement, claiming his TV viewership was “the highest number in history.”
Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 1, 2018
It wasn’t. It wasn’t even a record for Trump.
According to viewer data collected by Nielsen, the president attracted 45.6 million television viewers on Tuesday. That is a smaller television audience than former President Barack Obama brought in for his first State of the Union (48 million) and it is even less than what Trump achieved with his first prime-time address last year (47.7 million).
Because his State of the Union claim is so similar, it brought flashbacks to his erroneous claim about having the largest inaugurating crowd size in history. And because partisanship is so predictable, that news cycle immediately started over.
Opponents accused the president of lying. Supporters said that Internet viewership needed to be factored in the numbers. And maybe at first glance, there is something to that last argument about live streaming: 4.6 million viewers tuned in online to watch the inauguration according to TechCrunch.
But Trump’s swearing-in happened in the middle of the day while most everyone was at work. His State of the Union happened in prime time and, in theory, everyone should’ve been able to watch it from home.
If the president broke records, viewers would have had to inexplicably switched off broadcast television and headed to the Internet. The online numbers would have to be staggering because Trump is so far behind. The most watched State of the Union address was actually former President George W. Bush’s 2003 speech with an audience of 62 million. Former President Bill Clinton came in a distant second in 1998 with 53 million viewers.
To win silver, Trump needs 7.4 million viewers to watch online, roughly the population of Washington state. To win gold, Trump needs 15.4 million, an audience bigger than the population of Pennsylvania.
The arithmetic just isn’t in the administration’s favor. Asking midterm voters to do the math when it comes to the State of the Union is stupid because it is distracting. For the first time in a long time, Trump had looked presidential.
Democrats refused to stand for even the most bipartisan points in his speech, making the president look like the adult in the room. Time spent bickering over ratings is time lost reflecting on the few bright spots of this presidency. In a tight spot ahead of the midterm elections, Trump should skip this fight.
