If there is just one single metric by which Donald Trump seems to have wanted his entire public life gauged, it isn’t whether people think of him as kind, or thoughtful, or particularly intelligent. Instead, Trump has traded every bit of positive evaluation by standards any normal person would wish for in exchange for ratings.
Now that he doesn’t have his own television show anymore, it’s actually opened him up to two fronts on which he can be rated, and he’s always struggled with one of them: Approval rating. That’s a two-pronged evaluation, since it measures not just how many people actively approve of his job as President, but how many actively disapprove of what he’s done — not that he ever acknowledges the second factor, but it’s there.
His struggle for a better approval rating has been made difficult by essentially the simplest explanation of all: He has no idea what he’s doing. If you plucked the Red Sox’ best pitcher from the bullpen and made him the starting quarterback for the Patriots, there would be some people who would approve just because they’re fans. But you’d probably see a lot of the same numbers that Donald Trump has seen since January 2017, and he almost can’t be blamed for it; he just has no clue how any of this works.
But if he thought he was out of the weeds with television ratings just because he doesn’t have a show on NBC anymore, he’s sorely mistaken. Because now, ALL the television stations get judged on his appearances, because he’s on all of them. If a station carries his State of the Union speech, it gets ratings. Ceremonies? Ratings. Rallies? Ratings.
All those ratings are in a nosedive, according to a new report from Politico out late on Wednesday. And when it comes to the network Trump has been counting on to be his biggest cheerleader, Fox News, he’s learning that ratings are their biggest concern as well — not his approval ratings.
It turns out that, at a time when Trump and the GOP could use the support of cable’s highest-rated news channel among old people who want to get mad at someone for something, Fox is dropping coverage of the President, because even the old geezers who watch their channel are getting sick of seeing Trump yammer about the same things for hours at a time. It’s not like, if they’re committed to carrying one of his rallies, they can just cut away to a commercial while he’s talking. And when are his rallies? In evening prime time.
If Trump thinks he’s special enough for any network to give up premium ad buys during prime time in the evening just so they can show an hour straight of him leading his chorus of deplorables in another chant about some undoubtedly female Democratic villain, he’s even dumber than this article is giving him credit for.
Featured image via YouTube
