President Trump’s State of the Union address is on course for a smaller viewership than in the previous three years of his presidency.
Across the four major broadcast networks, his speech on Tuesday drew 15.9 million viewers according to early estimates, a 21% fall from last year. CBS scored the largest audience for the SOTU with 4.6 million viewers, swiftly followed by NBC with 4.4 million. ABC and Fox were close together in third and fourth, with the former garnering 3.6 million viewers and the latter 3.4 million.
The cable news and other network numbers will be added as they come in later in the day, but so far it doesn’t bode well for this SOTU speech compared compared to previous years.
In 2019, 46.8 million viewers tuned in to watch Trump address a joint session of Congress across 12 networks that carried the speech. That represented a small 3% bump on his 2018 address, which drew around the 45.6 million.
Trump’s speech on Tuesday featured a whole lot of fanfare, including awarding conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh — who recently revealed his advanced lung cancer diagnosis — with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, surprising the family of Sergeant First Class Townsend Williams with his early return from deployment, and surprising a grade-school student with an “opportunity scholarship” to attend the “school of [her] choice.”
The president also touted America’s economy and appeared to position the last three years of his presidency as a step toward his “Make America Great Again” campaign.
However, the theatrics weren’t done there, as while Trump wrapped up his remarks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore up a printed copy of his remarks right behind him.