Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that GOP fans react as Donald Trump interview with Tucker Carlson on X hit 200 MILLION views.
Trump called his critics ‘savages,’ spoke openly about the potential death of 80-year old President Biden, and riffed about low-flow shower heads and electric cars.
He said he didn’t attend the debate because he is ‘leading by 50 and 60 points’ in the polls and didn’t want to be ‘harassed by people that shouldn’t even be running for president’.
Former Fox host Carlson also asked Trump if he thought the U.S. was heading towards a civil war, if his enemies were trying to kill him and if he believed Jeffrey Epstein was ‘murdered’.
Fox News has not released official figures for the debate. When it does at around 2pm on Thursday, they will not be anywhere close to 200 million.
The network, America’s most-watched cable news channel, averages about 1.1 million viewers a day. Carlson’s Fox show, its most-watched program, drew about 3.3 million viewers on average in the weeks before it was scrapped.
Critics say X’s metrics are not a reliable gauge of success and point to the fact engagement – likes, shares a comments – was still below 1 million on Thursday morning. Viewers are also counted more than once if they see the video several times, whereas Fox will know exactly how many people tuned into the debate.
But as a comparison, none of Fox News’ X posts about its own debate had more than 110,000 views on Thursday morning. That’s despite the network having 24 million followers, compared to Carlson’s 9.7 million.
Donald Trump has praised his own ‘BLOCKBUSTER’ interview with Tucker Carlson on Elon Musk’s ‘X’ platform, which had reached over 150 million views by early Thursday morning and stole the spotlight from Fox News’ Republican presidential debate.
The former president’s 45-minute sit-down on X, formerly known as Twitter, aired as his GOP rivals bickered on stage in a crucial night for the 2024 White House race.
Regardless of the way X counts ‘views’ – each time a user scrolls past the video, even without watching any of it, the tally rises – cable news executives will be unsettled by the numbers.
All eyes are now on Fox News. Not only did Trump’s interview overshadow the network’s ‘official’ Republican debate which he shunned, it was fronted by their former golden boy Carlson, whose top-rated show was axed by Fox in April.
The success of Carlson’s Trump interview has reignited the debate which started after he moved to Elon Musk’s Twitter: do cable news networks face an existential threat from X and other social media platforms?
The Trump-Carlson face-to-face has already eclipsed the most-watched TV interview of all time – Oprah and Michael Jackson’s 1993 hit, which garnered over 62 million views. It also trumped Tucker’s Andrew Tate interview from July, which drew in 107 million views.
Trump is preparing to surrender at a Georgia jail later Thursday on election fraud charges and is expected to have a mugshot taken – a historic first for a former president.
The viewing figures are almost certain to eclipse the number of Americans who tuned into Fox to watch Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy and the rest of the GOP field go to battle to try and close the gap with the frontrunner. However, the millions of views also counted X users who scrolled past the video, and didn’t tune in for the whole interview.
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