There are a few data points that Donald Trump relies upon to evaluate his political popularity.
There’s polling (though he tends to cherry-pick polls to highlight those that show him doing better and to ignore or misrepresent those in which he’s trailing). There’s the size of his crowds (though here, again, he regularly offers up false assertions about how many people came to see him and how many attended rallies hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris). There’s the stock market (which, continuing a theme, is eternally up because of Trump and down because of Harris, no matter what is happening). And then there’s his old standby: television ratings.
On Thursday, as Harris was preparing to formally accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Trump alerted his followers on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns, that he would be “doing a call-in to [Fox News host] Bret Baier and group after her Speech.” He promised to be “very honest in my assessment,” which certainly feels like a doth-protest-too-much thing to say.
The actual appearance was a bit odd. The hosts, Baier and Martha MacCallum, repeatedly tried to get a word in as the brief conversation was wrapping up. (This has historically been one obvious reason that Trump likes doing phone-in interviews.) After it was over, clips of Trump talking about President Joe Biden with Baier and MacCallum gently giving him the hook got a decent amount of traction online. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd mocked Trump’s “scream-of-consciousness call to Fox News” and its abrupt ending in a column.
Trump noticed.
“Bret Baier of FoxNews called me, I didn’t call him, just prior to the Kamala Convention speech, and asked me if I would like to critique her after she is finished. I agreed to do so!” Trump wrote on social media Sunday morning. He repeated his criticisms of the speech and then declared Dowd to be “WRONG” in saying he called the network. “I don’t have to make calls to go on TV, or anything else — They call me! It’s called Ratings, I guess, and I’m the ‘Ratings Machine!’”
Let’s set aside the distinction without much difference here involving Dowd saying “call to” in lieu of “call with Fox News.” Instead, let’s focus on how much good Fox’s deployment of the “Ratings Machine” did for their numbers.
Over the course of the convention, Fox News was running a steady and consistent third behind CNN and MSNBC, the other two major 24-hour news channels. This isn’t terribly surprising given that Fox’s audience skews more heavily Republican and therefore was less interested in even the network’s relatively modest coverage of the convention. In the six hours from 6 p.m. until midnight each night, Fox News had over 3 million viewers in only two, both on Monday. MSNBC, by contrast, beat 3 million viewers in 17 of those 24 hours. (These numbers are from AdWeek.)
The worst night for Fox was the night Michelle and Barack Obama spoke. But Thursday, the night Harris accepted, wasn’t that great either. The network had about 2.6 million viewers in the 9 p.m. hour, fewer than half of what MSNBC got. In the 10 p.m. hour, during which Harris began speaking, Fox’s audience fell to 2.3 million.
But then the Ratings Machine kicked in, and Fox News’s audience jumped to … a bit under 2.8 million. It was the network’s third-best hour during the span of the convention, an improvement of about 170,000 viewers over the 9 p.m. hour. It was also less than a third of the audience tuning in to CNN and MSNBC’s convention coverage that hour.
Trump has long insisted that he is a remarkable ratings magnet. During the 2016 campaign, for example, he regularly gave the impression that his show “The Apprentice” was a consistent ratings winner. In reality, it was the top-rated show in the country only once, in its premiere season. The idea that ratings were both a measure of his popularity and something at which he excelled seems nevertheless to have taken root.
On Thursday, it didn’t seem to do much for Fox. Trump has 7.6 million followers on Truth Social, a group he was encouraging to join him as he posted about the Harris speech in real time. The increase from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. was about a half-million people; the increase from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. a third of that.
There’s a better indicator that Trump might not be a Ratings Machine than these metrics, mind you. If Fox News thought that Trump would draw viewers like a magnet, they wouldn’t have tried to cut him off. Instead, they transitioned quickly to Greg Gutfeld’s joke-related show, letting the Ratings Machine presumably get back to his customers at his club.
