Donald Trump ‘Probably Humiliated’ at TV Rating Loss: Al Sharpton

Civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton, a Kamala Harris supporter, has speculated that Donald Trump is “probably humiliated” by Harris outperforming his television ratings at the Democratic National Convention.
“In many ways I think he [Trump] cannot find a way to deal with this prosecutor [Harris],” Sharpton said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday.. “He’s probably humiliated that the Convention did much better in the ratings than his Convention did.
“And he’s one of these that are very much into looking at ratings,” he said. “Her speech got much larger ratings than his did at the Republican Convention.”
Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign via email for comment.
More than 20 million people tuned in to watch all four nights of the Democratic National Convention, beating the July Republican National Convention in total viewership on every day.
According to viewership rating company Nielsen, some 26.2 million viewers tuned in to the final day of the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, with the figure peaking at 28.9 million viewers when Harris formally accepted her party’s presidential nomination.
This beat the final night of the RNC conference, which had 25.4 million viewers and peaked at 28.4 million during Trump’s keynote address. It was also higher than the viewing figures for the final night of the 2020 DNC, when Biden accepted the Democratic nomination with 24.6 million viewers.
Trump, a former reality television personality, has mentioned “ratings” in 546 posts on his X, formerly Twitter, and Truth Social accounts since 2010, regularly using “low ratings” as an insult, and “highest ratings” as a praise.
In his book On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said that Trump was fixated on the television ratings of his daily press briefings at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
“After one briefing in March, the president asked me to come into his side office adjacent to the Oval Office, a room with multiple TV screens on the wall, all turned to different news outlets,” Fauci wrote. “He called the Fox News personality Sean Hannity. ‘Hey Sean,’ he said on speakerphone. ‘You should see the ratings we have!’
“After another packed briefing in the White House Press Room, he left the podium with me and other members of the task force, and as we entered the anteroom, he looked up at the television screen and exclaimed, ‘Our ratings are amazing! We’ve got to keep doing this. We got better ratings than cable, better ratings than the networks!”
Trump’s only mention of ratings in relation to last week’s DNC was a post last Wednesday on Truth Social with a link to a Breitbart News article claiming that the convention had lower ratings than the 2016 DNC.
Neither the Brietbart article, nor Trump mention that the 2024 Republican National Convention had lower ratings than the DNC.