MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell took a swipe at night one of the Republican National Convention, where former President Donald Trump made his first public appearance after his attempted assassination.
Sitting in on a panel with Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace and Joy Reid, O’Donnell said on MSNBC Tuesday that the event was a “very low-rated convention” for Trump.
“I think it’s one of the reasons why he went there,” O’Donnell said on TV. “And I think even if he hadn’t been attacked, there’s a possibility he would have gone to try to pump up his ratings. He did everything he could to pump up Monday night’s ratings that are lower than the Monday night ratings of his 2016 convention.”
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The first telecasts of the RNC on Monday drew in 18.1 million viewers across 12 cable news and broadcast networks, per Nielsen. For comparison, in 2016, the RNC drew approximately 23 million viewers across seven networks.
On Fox News, roughly 6.9 million viewers tuned in to the 2024 convention.
“So that’s six million ardent Trump supporters is the most they can get,” O’Donnell said. “Less than 10 percent of ardent Trump voters decided, ‘I’m going to watch this thing last night.'”
“That’s really not that much of a bump for Fox,” Maddow replied.
“I’ve written episodes of drama series that have gotten bigger ratings,” O’Donnell said with a laugh, referencing his tenure as a writer and producer of “The West Wing,” the Emmy-winning NBC drama. “I used to get 20 million people routinely on Wednesday nights at 9 p.m.”
Trump is famously obsessed with ratings, a fixation he developed as host of “The Apprentice,” the NBC series that ran from 2004 through 2015.
O’Donnell and Trump have had a long-standing feud over the years. In 2019, O’Donnell reported on MSNBC that Russian oligarchs had co-signed a loan provided to then-President Trump by Deutsche Bank, to which an attorney for Trump demanded that NBC “retract, correct and apologize” for the report, calling it “false and defamatory.”
After O’Donnell apologized and retracted the report, Trump personally attacked the anchor on X (formerly Twitter), saying that O’Donnell had been “forced by NBC to apologize, which he did while crying, for things he said about me & The Apprentice” in the past, and was “again forced to apologize” for his report on Trump’salleged Russian financial ties.
