I still say it was a pretty lousy move of Donald Trump to not only skip the GOP primary debate but to schedule an interview with Tucker Carlson for the same time. But Trump is Trump, and he will do what he wants to do because he feels entitled to the Republican nomination in 2024, and he wants to steal the thunder of his rivals.
And it’s easy to believe he did based on the number of views the interview has received. As of this writing, the interview has acquired over 161 million views. According to reports, 75 million came in the first 20 minutes.
The Trump campaign, naturally, thinks it destroyed the debate.
“President Trump won this evening’s Republican debate in dominating fashion,” Trump campaign senior adviser Susie Wiles said in a statement. “More people watched President Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson than the rest of the field on the debate stage combined. Tonight, voters saw a clear contrast between President Trump engaging in a thoughtful policy discussion about what his second term will look like versus 90-second canned sound bites and platitudes from the debate stage.”
Wilis added, “What is clear after the dust settles: none of the other candidates looked ready to take on Crooked Joe Biden. Only one leader can Make America Great Again, and that’s President Donald J. Trump.”
100 MILLION VIEWS IN 4 HOURS.
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 24, 2023
Look, I don’t doubt that a lot of people watched the interview. But was it really 160 million? Let’s just get this right out of the way: No.
Let’s put this into perspective. One hundred sixty million is roughly half of the population of the United States, and let me assure you that half of the country did not watch Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson.
As I’ve previously noted, Twitter, which is now called X, doesn’t have nearly the same reach as television. Roughly 97% of households have at least one television, while only 23% of American adults use X. Heck, X, despite being a popular platform, doesn’t have the same reach as YouTube, Facebook, or even Instagram, which are used by 81%, 69%, and 40% of adults respectively.
If half the country isn’t even on X, how is it possible for Trump’s interview to have so many views? Easy. That’s because the number of views attributed to a video includes those who watch the entire video, just a portion of it, or even scroll past it on their feed without even looking at it. Multiple views by the same user are also counted as unique views. You don’t have to take my word for it, either. That’s information coming straight from X.
As a reminder, here’s how each network defines a “view”…
YouTube, 30 seconds.
FB/IG, 3 seconds
Twitter/X, 2 seconds
TikTok, 1 second
Snapchat, 1 second
— David Herrmann (@herrmanndigital) August 14, 2023
In other words, the number of people who actually sat and watched the entire interview is likely a small fraction of that 161 million number. Make no mistake about it: a lot of people watched Trump’s interview. But I wouldn’t be shocked to find out the debate had more viewers.
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