... and other fairy tales.
Trump tweeted on February 1st - "Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history.
For once, he actually got the raw numbers close to right. Unfortunately, he completely blew the ranking. According to the math I learned, 6th place does not count as the "highest number". We have seen this dyslexia on Trump's part before. When he looks at two or more numbers, whichever number is attributed to him is the largest, most, best, etc. When he looks at the numbers 68, 53, 51.7, 48, 45.8, and 45.6 it is obvious that 45.6 is the highest.
Let's say the Neilson rating service made a slight error. Then maybe you could make a case that Trump could leap ahead of Clinton's 1994 numbers. He would then be in 5th place, still not quite 1st. Trump would need way more than even those three million illegal voters to get past Bush's 2002 or 2003 ratings. He'd need about 16½ million more viewers.
Why does Trump consistently lie about things that can be easily checked? In a White House "clarification", they stated that Trump was referring to cable news network viewers. Yet, he used the 45.6 million total TV viewer number in his tweet. This just amounts to the normal White House spin and damage control. It is a fulltime job for several people.
The 45.6 viewers were spread over 12 networks. Fox News did have the highest viewership during the speech. Congratulations to them. The next highest rated networks were NBC (7.1 million) and CBS (7 million). You can see all the ratings in the PolitiFact article.
It seems only right that Trump would vastly exaggerate the ratings of a speech that was full of lies and misrepresentations. Guess you can't teach an old dog new tricks, it's in his DNA.
wjh
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