Over on Truth Social, Trump is saying his inauguration set all kinds of viewership records that have stood since Reagan. He’s more popular than Reagan!
For all we know, his sycophants may well have told him that, even ginned up some fake ratings reports, to keep him happy.
Maybe it’s like those baseball stats you hear about where they add so many qualifiers to a “record” that it becomes meaningless. but they mention it to fill the time and have something to talk about during a particularly dry part of a game.
Like… “For left-handed hitters in the month of October, he has the third-highest batting average for people from the state of Missouri born after 1985.”
If you add enough garbage you can make anything seem like a record. And if your job was to inflate Trump’s ego (or at least limit his tantrums) you can conjure any kind of “technically true” stat that makes him feel better about what was clearly a disastrous showing for a presidential inauguration by any objective measure.
Potemkin ratings for the village idiot.
It is absolutely something like that.
When I was in the Cub scouts we were part of a local baseball league. For a long time I kept a copy of an article clipped from the neighborhood newspaper reporting on the team’s seasonal performance because the last line of the article stated that I had made the most walks. My sole athletic achievement!
I’m somewhat surprised they didn’t add “people who pictured what the Inauguration probably looked like while not watching it” to those figures.
Hey, a stat is a stat!
A pardoned 1/6 traitor has been shot dead by police after resisting arrest during a traffic stop in Indiana.
Trump will lower flags to half mast to honor this national hero.
Hey, he broke Reagan’s TikTok viewership record? I would tip my maga hat to that, if I had a maga hat.
Well, Trump as much as told those he pardoned that they were above the law.
Looks like this guy decided to act on it.
That is some Tasty Schadenfreude! 2 down, 1498ish to go!
Newsweek says that the people watching Trump’s inauguration on TV wasn’t 80.7 million, it was 24.6 million according to Nielsen.
According to Nielsen’s data, Trump’s inauguration viewership was the fourth-lowest since 1997, when Bill Clinton’s second swearing-in totaled an audience of 21.6 million people. In 2012, Barack Obama’s second inauguration recorded a total of 20.5 million viewers, while George W. Bush’s second inauguration recorded a total of 15.5 million viewers in 2005. Second inaugrations typically attract fewer viewers.
He just flat-out lied with his inauguration numbers for TV viewership. (Big surprise there.)
On the other hand, for a second inauguration it wasn’t particularly low either. Most people don’t care about them and don’t bother to tune in no matter who it is.
I think some tuned in to watch the monkeys fling poo and do Nazi salutes.
There may certainly have been a sideshow appeal to it.
People slow down to look at car wrecks, too.
And boy do they come out of the woodwork to watch shit burn down no matter what time of night.
To clarify the headline, he was previously wanted, and is now sought.