dpThere were two big events on television last Wednesday night: President Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican Party’s midterm convention, and the NFL’s 2025-26 season kickoff game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots.
The NFL game drew more than 25 million viewers. Trump’s speech reached about 3 million viewers.
By the time the Nielsen ratings came in, however, the president had already declared victory for the convention and himself.
“The overall numbers beat the NFL,” Trump wrote on Truth Social the next morning, long before any such numbers were available.
Trump’s post was written in such a way that it is hard to fact-check, even now. But all the available data indicates that the Seahawks–Patriots Super Bowl rematch was the main attraction on Wednesday night.
And that’s notable because the GOP decided to schedule the first-of-its-kind convention on the same nights as the first two NFL games of the season.
Heading into the convention, there were questions — and concerns and jokes — about whether Trump and the GOP would be overshadowed by the football games.
“Programming against the NFL? A mistake for the TV master,” Fox co-host Jessica Tarlov remarked as the convention got underway on Wednesday.
Trump spoke for nearly two hours that night, and his speech was shown live on Fox News, as well as two other Nielsen-rated channels, Newsmax and NewsNation.
Fox News averaged 2.5 million viewers during the speech, an underwhelming total given that the cable network attracts almost as many viewers on a normal night.
Newsmax had almost 400,000 viewers during the speech, while NewsNation had about 125,000, according to Nielsen data.
So there was no “Trump bump” in the ratings. Whether that’s an ominous sign for the Republican Party in the midterm elections is an open question. But it lines up with other recent observations about a lack of GOP base enthusiasm.
On Truth Social, Trump appeared preoccupied with the possibility that people would think the event was a dud.
He wrote the next morning that it was “a major, sold out hit, far bigger, better, and more important than anyone thought possible. It was really something, streaming all over the place, and really big numbers, despite going up against the NFL. The overall numbers beat the NFL.”
He went on to tout the size of the crowds in the Dallas arena, trying to deny reporters’ observations of empty seats.
Trump invoked the fact that his speech was “streaming all over the place,” as if to suggest that the cumulative audience would somehow surpass the NFL game.
But that’s illogical, given the enormous ratings for the Seahawks–Patriots game, which was shown on the NBC broadcast network and the Peacock streaming service.
NBC announced on Monday that the game averaged 25.1 million viewers across both broadcast and streaming. By contrast, the most-viewed YouTube videos of Trump’s night one speech have only hundreds of thousands of views.
Trump’s much shorter night two speech was up against the NFL’s first-ever game in Melbourne, Australia, where the San Francisco 49ers played the Los Angeles Rams, live on Netflix.
That game averaged 18.5 million viewers in the US, according to Nielsen.
Trump’s night two speech averaged 2.6 million viewers via Fox News; 350,000 via Newsmax; and about 100,000 via NewsNation.
The president didn’t post anything more about the ratings afterward.
