From Media Matters
President Donald Trump might have been cheering the New England Patriots' historic comeback on Super Bowl Sunday, but he couldn't have been happy about his own contribution to the day. His sit-down interview with Bill O'Reilly, which aired during Fox's pre-Super Bowl coverage, turned out to be something of a ratings dud. And for a president who obsesses over TV ratings and uses them to validate his own identity, the Sunday interview seemed to be the latest example of his fading personal appeal.
Trump's Q&A with O'Reilly drew approximately 12 million viewers. That's a respectable number, but when President Barack Obama sat down for the traditional pre-Super Bowl interview in 2009, his first year in office, almost 22 million people tuned in, nearly double Trump's audience. (And it wasn't a matter of who was playing later; game viewership ratings in 2017 were substantially higher than those in 2009.) Even Obama's pre-Super Bowl interviews during his second term in office easily outpaced the audience size for Trump's recent sit-down. Obama drew 18 million viewers in 2014, 16 million in 2015, and 15 million last year.
That's been the pattern in recent weeks, as Trump, who spent 2016 chronically boasting about his ability to spike TV news ratings, clearly falls short of the ratings successes Obama posted early in his presidency. As the least popular new president in modern American history, Trump seems to having trouble connecting with the masses.
For instance, on January 25, ABC News' David Muir conducted the first prime-time interview with Trump following his inauguration. The show "didn't set the Nielsen charts aflame," drawing just 7.5 million viewers and weakly performing in the "advertiser-coveted" 18-49 demographic, as Variety reported. How many viewers watched Obama's first prime-time interview as president? Seventeen million, or 10 million more than tuned in for Trump.
At the end of last month, when Trump turned his announcement of a Supreme Court nominee into a prime-time production, 33 million people watched. In contrast, Obama's first prime-time event was a press conference he held on the night of February 4, 2009, when nearly 50 million Americans watched.