In Donald Trump’s petty little mind, the ability to grab people’s attention is all a president needs to be truly great. For that reason, he insisted that Joe Biden would never win the 2020 presidential election, since he didn’t draw giant rally crowds like Trump did. Of course, there was a pandemic happening and the country was electing a president and not an entertainer, but reason has never been Trump’s strong suit.
Variety: Early Nielsen ratings show more people watched Biden's inauguration on TV than Trump's inauguration. https://t.co/PebDa2apaz
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 21, 2021
It will come as quite a shock to Trump, the man who ruined his press secretary’s career when he demanded that he announce that Trump had the biggest inauguration crowd “of all time,” that the virtual inauguration of President Joe Biden earned significantly higher ratings than Trump’s did.
According to Variety:
‘Approximately 39.87 million people watched the half-hour swearing-in ceremony over the nation’s six major TV-news outlets, according to Nielsen, compared with 38.35 million viewers for the 2017 event. The 2021 figure represents an approximately 4% increase over its 2017 predecessor.
‘CNN’s coverage captured an average of 9.9 million for the pivotal half hour, leading the pack. The AT&T-backed cable-news network said the numbers represented the biggest audience it has captured for an inauguration broadcast in its history.’
With the spectacle of Trump out of the way, and the country taking a large, collective sigh of relief, it seems that a message of hope, rather than a message of doom, was what met America’s needs on inauguration night. Promises of a brighter future are just more popular than rabid conspiracy theories, a fact that’s sure to confound the former president.
Twitter was happy to hear the news and only regretted that they couldn’t directly share it with the ousted president. Read some of their comments below: