Trump Says RNC TV Ratings ‘Beat the NFL’—What the Data Shows - Newsweek
President Donald Trump claimed that television ratings for the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention “beat the NFL,” but early audience data provides little support for his boast.
Trump made the claim after speaking for nearly two hours at the convention in Dallas on Wednesday. “It was really something, streaming all over the place, and really big numbers, despite going up against the NFL,” he wrote on Truth Social. “The overall numbers beat the NFL.”
Complete Nielsen figures for the NFL season opener between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks are not yet available, but preliminary data, reported by Mediaite, shows that Fox News—the only major cable news network to carry Trump’s full address—averaged about 2.5 million viewers from 9 to 11 p.m. ET.
That was roughly level with the channel’s usual programming and less than one-tenth of the 28.3 million viewers who watched the 2025 NFL kickoff game, according to NBC Sports.
Trump’s use of the phrase “overall numbers” leaves unclear which audiences he included or how they were calculated. No methodology accompanied his claim, and combining television audiences with views of livestreams and clips across social platforms would not provide a direct comparison with Nielsen’s average-minute audience for an NFL broadcast.
The president made a similar comparison after his second inauguration in January 2025. Trump said an estimated 80.7 million people had watched the ceremony when television viewership was combined with online figures, including 9.6 million views on YouTube and 36.7 million views for a stream posted to his X account.
“In combination with TV viewership, an estimated 80.7 million viewers watched the President’s Inauguration, which beats the previous record of 42 million viewers with Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration in 1981,” he wrote, according to WION.
Those measurements were not directly comparable. Nielsen estimated that Trump’s inauguration averaged 24.6 million television viewers across 15 networks, well below the 41.8 million who watched Reagan’s first inauguration in 1981.
Nielsen’s figures did not include streaming, while online views can include repeat plays and do not necessarily represent individual people watching simultaneously. Forbes also reported that the television audience for Trump’s 2025 inauguration was smaller than those for his first inauguration in 2017 and Joe Biden’s in 2021.
Nielsen estimates how many people watched a program, while online totals count views, including repeat plays. Adding views from different platforms may also count the same person more than once.
The Reagan comparison also placed events from different media eras side by side: YouTube, X and modern livestreaming services did not exist in 1981. Trump’s reference to the convention’s “overall numbers” could similarly encompass online traffic unavailable to past events, but without a breakdown it cannot be evaluated against the NFL’s standardized audience measurement.
Although exact figures are hard to determine across multiple platforms and networks, Donald Trump has previously drawn some large audiences for his speeches, particularly during his first term.
In January 2017, his inaugural address was watched by just over 30 million people on television in the U.S. alone, plus millions more via live streams going all over the world.
And in 2016, well over 32 million watched then-candidate Trump accept the GOP presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention.
Contact Newsweek editor on this story: Edward Pearcey.
