Rachel Maddow scored her most-watched episode ever of “The Rachel Maddow Show” with an interview of President Trump’s niece Mary Trump.
The sit-down drew a whopping 5.2 million total viewers, easily beating Maddow’s previous record for her MSNBC show of around 4.5 million viewers (which dates back to her conversation with Lev Parnas, who was at the center of Trump’s impeachment earlier this year). That also represents the the highest-rated regularly scheduled show ever on MSNBC, according to the network.
In the interview, Mary Trump shared her insights on how the President lies, and his want to construct comeback narratives for himself. Mary Trump’s book “Too Much and Never Enough,” which the President tried to block her from publishing, sold almost 1 million copies when it hit the shelves earlier this week.
In the Maddow interview, Mary Trump revealed that she heard President Trump use anti-Semitic slurs and say the N-word on multiple occasions.
“Of course I did, and I don’t think that should surprised anybody given how virulently racist he is today,” she said.
Later on in the interview, Mary Trump explained why she made the decision to publish her book now, rather than prior to the 2016 election which saw her uncle sweep into office.
“It wasn’t just the speed with which he started upending norms, which he had started doing during the campaign, it was the number of people who lined up to help him in the endeavor, which has only grown longer and more egregious as time has gone on. I can’t say there was a last straw because there have been so many straws, but certainly the horrors at the border, the separating of children from their parents, the torture, the kidnapping and the incarceration of them in cages was unthinkable, unbearable. When an opportunity presented itself to me to do something, I needed to take a leap,” Mary Trump told Maddow.
“The Rachel Maddow Show” also came out as the top program in total viewers across all of broadcast and cable for the night. Maddow also emerged as the number one cable show in the key news demographic of people aged 25-54.
Maddow’s tally narrowly surpassed the total number of viewers who tuned in to Fox News on June 25 for Sean Hannity’s June 25 town hall with President Trump. That drew 5.1 million viewers, which also represents a gigantic number for cable news.
Cable news overall is currently going through a ratings boom. Q2 of this year saw Tucker Carlson break the record previously held by Hannity for the highest-rated quarter for a cable news program. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” drew 4.33 million total viewers to Hannity’s 4.31 million.