Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is only a month old, and her large rallies have already provoked the flailing anger of her opponent: the crowd-size-obsessed Donald Trump. But as the 2024 Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago this week, Trump has moved on to obsessing over the size of something else.
In recent days, according to two sources familiar with the matter, the notoriously ratings-fixated former president has been asking some of his media and political allies what they think the Democratic convention’s TV ratings will be like. In these private moments, Trump has been sure to stress that the viewership he pulled for his televised acceptance speech on the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month was “tremendous,” and that he feels it is unlikely Vice President Harris will be able to top his numbers on the evening she gives her big speech.
The DNC began in Chicago on Monday. Harris is slated to deliver her acceptance speech on Thursday night. There are roughly 2.5 months left in the bruising, high-stakes presidential contest between Harris and Trump.
Asked about Trump’s concerns about Harris’ forthcoming TV ratings, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung responded, “Voters know Kamala is weak, failed, and dangerously liberal, and the Democrat ticket is the most radical in American history.”
It is obviously too soon to say whether Trump or Harris will retain the viewership bragging rights. Recent history, however, is a mixed bag for Trump. In 2016, the last night of Trump’s convention bested the numbers for his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trump’s viewership lagged behind Joe Biden, who ended up defeating Trump before bowing out of the 2024 contest.
Trump’s private queries about the convention ratings come at a time when polls show Harris hacking away at the significant leads Trump had built over Biden nationally and in the most crucial battleground states — and even pulling ahead. This has enraged the former president lately, as have the sizes of the rally audiences that Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have attracted.
If Thursday night’s broadcast hauls in enough viewers, it would give Democratic operatives yet another tool to try to mess with Trump’s head, a recurring theme in Harris-Walz messaging salvos. A Harris campaign official simply tells Rolling Stone that “yes, of course” the campaign will publicly troll Team Trump if the vice president’s ratings end up being higher than his were.
Before, during, and after his term in the White House, Trump has been intensely focused on the measurable sizes of his audiences and television ratings, seeing those metrics as roots of his power, political and otherwise. Indeed, he still to this day brags about the size of the crowd that he whipped up in Washington, D.C, on Jan. 6, 2021 — which was the culmination of his authoritarian attempts to cling to power, and climaxed in the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.
He even boasted about the ratings of the on-camera press briefings he delivered during the coronavirus pandemic, as the country was being absolutely throttled by economic implosion and high body counts on his watch.
Furthermore, according to a former senior Trump White House official, in early 2018, the then-president personally ordered his aides to show the press proof that his State of the Union address that year had the largest TV ratings of any commander in chief in American history — even though no such proof existed. “He was just getting angry that people in the media were going on TV saying his [first SOTU] ratings were lower than other times,” this ex-official recalls.
In the years leading up to his political ascent in 2015, the then-future president would regularly instruct his staff to pull data or pester TV hosts and correspondents about what the ratings were for his recent appearances.
“In 2013, [Trump] had me ask Jon Karl how the ratings were for an ABC interview he did with him, asking if he ‘won the hour,’” Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Trump, told The Daily Beast. “Other times when he would do, for instance, Fox News shows, he would always ask [executive assistant] Rhona Graff to ask the Fox host or staff if they could send him the exact ratings data of his interview or hit that he had just done. Sometimes he’d just ask them himself. Often, they wouldn’t send him the actual numbers but just transmit back something like, ‘They were fantastic, you won.’ He kept very close track of his ratings and always wanted the numbers so he could tweet them.”
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