Daniel Wolfram
One of Donald Trump’s worst nightmares just came true.
Donald Trump instructed his White House to hastily throw together a brand-new Republican midterm convention at the last minute.
The two-day event was meant to create headlines, much fanfare, and invigorate a slumping Republican Party.
The ratings numbers just came back on the first night of Trump-a-palooza and they are not looking great.
Trump-a-palooza fails to generate more viewers
Among the cable news networks, Fox News had the strongest viewership out of all the networks. However, it still did not generate more viewers compared to other primetime shows on the same network.
According to Deadline, Donald Trump’s two-hour speech from 9-11 p.m. Eastern Time averaged 2.3 million viewers. That is almost 500,000 fewer than the average primetime viewing from September 2025 on Fox News.
For comparison, Hannity drew an average of 2.89 million and Gutfeld! garnered an average of 2.94 million at 10 p.m. ET.
Trump fared even worse on CNN
CNN’s primetime coverage of the Republican convention was even worse. The two-hour coverage averaged 441,000 viewers, which is significantly worse compared to a 543,000 average last September.
However, the left-leaning and Trump-critical MS NOW saw a 300,000 increase in viewership compared to a year ago from 800,000 to around 1.1 million viewers.
The difference in MS NOW’s coverage is that they did not carry much of Trump’s speech, instead focusing on analysis of the convention from a panel in the studio.
Is the NFL to blame?
There could be two potential reasons for the ratings going down. The first reason is that people have Trump fatigue, mostly proven by his disastrous approval ratings ahead of the midterm election.
The second reason could be that the National Football League (NFL) kicked off its season on the same Wednesday and Thursday nights and at the same time as Trump-a-palooza.
Texas Republican strategist Vinny Minchillo agreed that this could become a problem for Trump and the GOP. “Certainly, conflicting with an NFL game early in the season is going to be tough,” Minchillo told The Hill.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson rejected that notion.
“The first night of the NFL I think is a streaming service, so there’s a paywall. I know there will be a lot of eyes on the convention,” Johnson said on the television station Newsmax.
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That is only partially true. The first game of the season between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots was broadcast on NBC, which is freely accessible. The second game was on Netflix, which approximately 90 million Americans subscribe to.
