Former President Donald Trump’s town hall event with Laura Ingraham of Fox News was the highest-rated cable newscast on Tuesday, reaching more than 3.2 million viewers on average, according to the network.
The hourlong event, which was recorded Tuesday afternoon and aired during The Ingraham Angle’s weekday slot at 7 p.m. EST, took place in Greenville, South Carolina, just days before Republican voters cast their primary vote in the state. Trump is polling far ahead of his last major GOP challenger, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who held her own speech in Greenville the same day, vowing to stay in the race for the White House.
“Congratulations to Laura Ingraham on getting the HIGHEST RATINGS last night in the history of her very successful show,” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social on Wednesday. “It beat all comers for the night/week. It just happened to be a Town Hall interview, from the Great State of South Carolina, with me.”
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump on Tuesday participates in a Fox News town hall with host Laura Ingraham at the Greenville Convention Center in Greenville, South Carolina. The event was the highest-rated…
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
When reached for comment, Fox News directed Newsweek to a release published Wednesday, which said that Trump’s town hall garnered 60 percent of the total cable news audience the day that it aired. The network also claimed that during the 7 p.m. EST time slot, Fox News “quadrupled CNN in total viewers” and “beat MSNBC by a triple-digit average.”
“Last night’s town hall marked the highest-rated airing of The Ingraham Angle since taking over the time slot,” the release added, noting that Trump’s town hall “notched a 45 percent increase in total viewers” when compared to the 2024 average.
Additional footage of Trump’s conversation with Ingraham was set to air at 7 p.m. Wednesday.
Trump’s conversation with Ingraham also beat out a town hall that Fox News hosted with Haley earlier in the week. The event, which was moderated by host John Roberts, aired on Sunday at 5 p.m. EST, and received 910,000 views, according to Wednesday’s press release. Haley’s town hall, however, “outpaced” and “outrated the average of all of CNN’s programming” the same night it aired, Fox News said.
Tuesday’s event, like many of Trump’s public appearances, was riddled with misleading statements, including comments relating to the former president’s federal classified documents case in Florida. Trump also compared himself to deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, arguing that the treatment Navalny faced under the Kremlin is the same treatment that the former president has received in court.
Trump was at one point corrected by Ingraham after he claimed that “you automatically have fraud” during an election when a mail-in voting system is used. Ingraham cut the former president off briefly after the comment, noting, “Well there’s mail-in voting in Florida, and you won huge.”
“When you go into a voting place, like you go into one in a properly run state, they look at you, you give voter ID, you give all sorts of identification,” Trump said Tuesday, ignoring Ingraham’s efforts to correct him. “It would be very hard to cheat [on] a mass scale.”
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Source : Newsweek