While leftists spent four years whining that an America under Donald Trump was a catastrophe, it looks like cable news without Trump is even worse.
In the first full week post-Trump, CNN’s ratings fell by more than 40 percent from the week before, and were down to less than half of the networks’ record-breaking numbers at the beginning of the year.
According to Variety, a less-than-stellar 2.04 million people tuned in to CNN’s primetime 8 o’clock shows during the week of January 22-29. By 9 o’clock, 2.1 million were watching; by 10, CNN was down to 1.7 million viewers.
That’s a sharp drop from just a week before, during the last days of the Trump administration. That week, a much higher 3.63 million people were tuned in to CNN at 8 p.m., with 3.8 million watching at 9:00.
And when traced back to early January, CNN’s audience decline is even worse. During the week of January 4-8, CNN clocked a record 5.19 million viewers during their 8 p.m. hour, holding steady at 5 million by 9:00 – more than twice as many as they pulled in the first week without Trump.
And it looks like things aren’t nearly as rosy over at MSNBC post-Trump, either. During the first week of January, MSNBC’s 8 and 9 o’clock shows had pulled in an impressive 4.6 million and 5.38 million viewers, respectively.
But between the last week of the Trump administration and the first week of Biden’s, the network’s ratings fell from 2.88 million viewers at 8 p.m. to 2.33 million. By 9, the network was down from 4.24 million to 3.77 million week-over-week.
Fox News' viewership was also down, albeit not by quite as high a margin. The right-leaning cable news network clocked 3.5 million viewers at 8 p.m. in the first week of Biden's administration, on par with the 3.5 million it pulled in the last week of Trump's. By 10 p.m., 2.28 million viewers were tuned in, compared to a slightly higher 2.38 million the week before.