Ex-President Donald Trump’s public profile is sinking fast, as outlined in a new report from The Washington Post. On Tuesday, Trump appeared on Newsmax for about half an hour, where he spoke with a host about a slew of topics — but after Newsmax’s post-election ratings boost, the far-right channel’s viewer numbers have sharply declined. On a particular date early last month (March 9), Newsmax “netted 175,000 viewers at any given time, versus Fox’s 1.49 million,” according to CNN. The next day, Newsmax’s overall average viewership stood at 169,000 at any particular time — and although he’s also appeared on Fox, this infrequently watched network is where Trump has ended up.
Overall, the number of minutes when Trump’s face appears on screen on cable news networks is down to a level comparable to the cable visibility that Trump had around the time of his presidential campaign announcement, when he was somewhat of an afterthought in the national political conversation. In March, the percent of 15-second cable news segments that mentioned Trump at all was down to a level on par with late 2015, before Trump had captured the Republican presidential nomination (but as his campaign picked up steam). Google search interest in Trump was also down, hitting a level lower than any other point since June 2015.
Trump has continued to claim that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the lack of remotely meaningful support for his theories. His grandiose sense of self-importance does not, however, match public interest in the former president, according to these numbers. Across the federal government, the Biden administration has been swiftly working to rectify the fallout of the Trump era, from undoing some of Trump’s cruel and pointless immigration policies to moving to protect and expand access to Obamacare instead of undercutting it.
Biden and his policies have routinely garnered higher levels of overall public approval than Trump got during his term. Trump left office with the overall approval of under 40 percent of the population, according to a weighted average from FiveThirtyEight, but Biden currently has the approval of about 53 percent of the public, according to the same source. Biden’s COVID-19 economic recovery package that he recently signed into law repeatedly received support from 70 plus percent of respondents.
