Thanks to the January 6th insurrection, Donald Trump can no longer issue long rants on Twitter. He tried to start his own website, but that has not gone all that well.
Instead, Trump has had to call into cable news stations to do his complaining. He has mostly called into Fox, and the Conservative news station has been happy to have him. But on Thursday, he called into Fox competitor OAN.
Host Chanel Rion set Trump up, saying, “Americans are tuning out and turning off the vast majority of news channels that are out there now, and the latest data showing their numbers are plummeting.”
The 45th president followed:
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
“CNN is down 50 or 60 percent nobody’s ever heard of that. MSNBC is down 50 percent. Fox is way down,” said Trump. “You know, Fox is comparing its numbers to last year, but last year they went way down because people felt that they really abandoned what they believed in, what I think the majority of the people of this country believed in, so Fox is way down. And you look, and it’s a very sad thing, and you wonder why they’re doing it. You wonder. What are they doing? What are they thinking? Because commercially, it’s so it’s a bad decision. You certainly would think so.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj5FFEIm0Mg
Trump isn’t wrong about the numbers being down, but there is nuance to the situation. Ratings typically rise during an election year and 2020 delivered especially high ratings. Trump being in office also made ratings rise. Now that a competent leader is in charge, Americans don’t have to fearfully watch cable news each night.
Todd Neikirk is a New Jersey based politics and technology writer. His work has been featured in psfk.com, foxsports.com and hillreporter.com. He enjoys sports, politics, comic books and spending time at the shore with his family.
