By President Donald Trump’s notoriously high standards for TV ratings, his 99-minute-long speech Tuesday missed the mark.
About 36.6 million people tuned in to 15 different networks to watch Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, according to Nielsen, making it the lowest-rated Congressional speech he’s ever given.
Viewership peaked roughly 45 minutes into his speech, between 9:45 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET, with 37.8 million tuning in. The majority of viewers were aged 55 and older, while viewership was lowest in the 18-34 age group at just 5.7 percent.
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Though Trump’s Tuesday night ratings were 13% higher than former President Joe Biden’s 32.2 million viewers in his 2024 State of the Union Address, they were still the lowest of the five such Trump speeches so far.
Trump’s viewership was highest during his 2017 address to a joint session of Congress, with an audience of 47.7 million.
In 2018, his viewership dipped to 45.5 million during his State of the Union Address.
Ratings recovered slightly the following year, with 46.78 million viewers tuning into Trump’s 2019 SOTU.
The president’s second-lowest rated speech was in 2020, when 37.17 million people watched his SOTU.
Trump, a former reality TV star of The Apprentice fame, is notoriously obsessed with TV ratings.
In July last year, he bragged about the Republican National Convention’s “big TV ratings” after data showed that the event was the most watched by TV audiences that week.
His second inauguration, however, saw viewership plunge to around 26 million, which was lower than the ratings for the past two Inauguration Days.
In the first major address of his second presidency, Trump spent nearly a hundred minutes blaming America’s woes—from the cost of eggs to the Ukraine war—on the Biden administration and Democrats.
“Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is gone,” Trump said as he patted himself on the back for the flurry of controversial moves he has taken since returning to office. “Our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again.”
