TUMBLEWEED

Trump TV Immediately Flops in Embarrassing Numbers Disaster

Nobody is paying attention to the self-declared “king of ratings.”

Donald Trump’s 24/7 “TV” channel has immediately flopped, in a humiliating ratings disaster for the president.

The 80-year-old former reality TV star, who calls himself “the king of ratings,” got a lot less than he bargained for after he banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House on Friday.

RUNNING ON RESIDUALS

Trump Debuts YouTube Channel With 80-Day-Old Speech

Erkki Forster

America’s major TV networks—NBC, ABC, CBS, and even Fox News—suspended their pooled coverage of Trump on Monday in solidarity, acting as the catalyst for the White House to launch “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” a 24-hour YouTube livestream of Trump’s greatest hits.

Plugging the stream, which is hosted on the existing White House YouTube channel, Trump’s deputy assistant Kaelan Dorr moaned that “the press, in some cases, reported inaccurately or not at all on the Administration’s many record-breaking accomplishments,” and floated Trump TV as a one-stop shop for all things Trump.

The only issue is that people don’t seem interested. The channel launched at 7 p.m. with around 8,000 viewers, but the audience had dropped below 4,000 just 90 minutes later. By 9 p.m. Eastern, the stream was attracting only about 3,000 viewers, a tiny audience compared with the millions watching the major networks at primetime.

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By around 10:40 p.m., just 2,425 people were watching. The channel has 3.18 million followers, so that’s a measly .076 percent.

It reached a new nadir at around 3.30 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, with just 1,123 watching a rerun of a speech he gave alongside Britain’s King Charles in Windsor a year ago.

The stream has been floated as a replacement for the “fake news” traditional media, but as their leading morning shows kicked off at 6 a.m. Trump’s channel floundered further at just above 1,000 viewers. This was during a speech on anti-fraud initiatives from May.

As it switched to another old Trump speech, it dipped below 1,000.

Trump announced the ban on Sept. 18, accusing CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO of producing “FAKE NEWS.”

In the Oval Office, he said the decision was based on “cumulative stories over the last two years” and complained that the outlets wrote “purposely negative” coverage intended to “diminish” him and his administration.

The administration deactivated the reporters’ hard passes on Saturday, barring them from the White House grounds, before removing CNN from the shared pool coverage rotation on Monday.

CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO filed a lawsuit the same day. The suit, filed in federal court in Washington, argues that the administration’s move violates the First and Fifth Amendments. It also points to Trump’s own words as evidence that the ban was retaliation for coverage he disliked, rather than a legitimate security or logistical decision.

“Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting,” the trio of organizations said in a joint statement.

The ban reportedly stemmed from Trump’s favorite aide, Natalie Harp, who played the president clips of anchors on MS NOW “criticizing his administration” before he pulled the plug, sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

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Harp, who earns $150,000 a year as an executive assistant, usually screens what coverage reaches the president, acting as a buffer between him and negative press.

But the whole saga has left Trump without an audience. The president now lacks a major network TV crew or photographers to cover him, as the pool has downed tools in solidarity with the banned networks.

This culminated in an awkward ribbon-cutting ceremony for his $13 million helipad that descended into a farce, with his remarks rendered virtually inaudible amid the absence of the traditional TV pool.

It all comes as Trump’s approval rating slumped to 32 percent, marking the lowest point of his second term and, according to Reuters, the lowest of his entire political career.

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