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| Trump Boasts, Incorrectly, That His State of the Union Drew the Largest Viewership | Trump Boasts, Incorrectly, That His State of the Union Drew the Largest Viewership |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday boasted, incorrectly, that his State of the Union address drew the highest number of viewers in history. He was off by a couple of million people. | |
| President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union speech in 2010 beat Mr. Trump’s by about 2 million, with some 48 million viewers. Even factoring in online streams, Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address would not outrank Mr. Obama’s. It is impossible to do an conclusive tally, but the White House’s official stream of Mr. Trump’s address on YouTube has drawn roughly 51,000 views while Mr. Obama’s 2010 address has been viewed 524,000 times. | |
| Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, regularly grades himself and others in ratings. | Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, regularly grades himself and others in ratings. |
| Here is a look at past instances when the president’s accounts of his ratings have been off. | |
| During his first full day in office, Mr. Trump grossly overestimated the size of his inauguration crowd, saying that up to 1.5 million people attended, when, in fact, aerial pictures showed it was much less. His press secretary at the time, Sean Spicer, doubled down on Mr. Trump’s assertion and said the president drew “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” Photographs of Mr. Obama’s inauguration in 2009 disproved that claim as well. | |
| In May, Mr. Trump said that when he appeared on CBS’s “The Late Show,” the program had its highest ratings ever. But he was off by a million or so viewers on that, too. The episode that aired when Mr. Trump was a guest in September 2015 was watched by 4.6 million people, whereas the first “Late Show” that Stephen Colbert hosted drew 6.6 million viewers, according to a CNN report. | |
| In late December, Mr. Trump said his “so-called low approval rating” was approximately the same as Mr. Obama’s at the same point in his presidency. Real Clear Politics data, however, shows that Mr. Obama’s average approval rating across major polls was about 10 points higher than Mr. Trump’s in the December of his first year in office. | |
| Just last month, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that his approval rating among black Americans had doubled (it has actually declined). In July, he also tweeted that his 40 percent approval rating, as recorded by an ABC/Washington Post poll, was “not bad” at this point in his presidency. The same poll shows that Mr. Trump’s approval rating at six months was the lowest recorded since World War II. |