The Tucker-Trump Live Stream Twitter-X Interview Broke the Interwebs!
Fox News Republican Primary Debate got 13 million viewers–maybe
August 24, 2024–Wednesday night was a big night for Republicans in the media with two heavyweight 2024 presidential primary-related programs happening in the same prime time slot.
Former president, runaway leader in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, and likely GOP party nominee in 2024, Donald J. Trump, sat down for an hour-long interview with Tucker Carlson (on Twitter-X) squaring off against the Fox News Republican 2024 Primary Debate for one of the two hours the debate ran.
Six GOP also-rans for president graced the debate stage: Asa Hutchinson, Mike Pence, Doug Burgum, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis. Larry Elder is suing the RNC over his claim that he met the criteria for inclusion. (Open links for general media background articles, not to candidate websites.)
Fox News executives reportedly met with Trump in Bedminster prior to the debate ostensibly to persuade him to appear.
Trump declined and then he enthusiastically announced his counter-programming interview with Tucker on Truth Social:
Steve Bannon on War Room compared what Trump would have faced on that stage had he gone to ‘walking into Dealey Plaza’ (the site where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated) adding it was an ‘obvious set up.’
Fox, the RNC, and nameless faceless rich donors — a media industrial complex in and of itself — played their familiar ‘Get Trump!’ game in the latest round between Trump the Gladiator Outsider representing we the people in his unique way, and hard liners of the Grand Ol’ Party. The game was every bit as lethal toward him as Bannon said.
The RNC stacked the live debate audience at the Fiserve Arena in Milwaukee with establishment partisans with most tickets going to anti-Trump rich donors. It was estimated only about ten percent of the audience in Milwaukee were Trump voters. They managed to boo the more extreme anti-Trump haters on that stage, namely Mike “Judas” Pence, Chris “Krispy Kreme” Christie, and Asa “Aida” Hutchinson. Although some say it was actually Nikki Haley who back-stabbed Trump the most. A sample of Haley’s dirty work:
“Biden didn’t ruin the economy – my old boss, who gave me everything and made me what I am today ruined it.”
Nikki Haley, August 23, Fox News 2024 Republican Primary Presidential Debate
Haley made another absurd claim that night: “Donald Trump is the most disliked person in politics.”
Things that make Nikki Haley ‘disliked’ include:
She believes climate change is real. She believes in upholding the two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. She is pro-Ukraine.
Fox then chose to ban all Trump media surrogates from entering the post-debate spin room. Trump’s surrogates led by his son, Don, Jr., included Kari Lake, and three members of Congress – Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Byron Donalds. Kimberly Guilfoyle, former Fox News host, was part of the group as well.
Don Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Greene called out Fox for its unprecedented censorship. Scroll down for article and clip.
RATINGS
As of around 3:30 pm, Trump reported that his interview with Tucker got 231 million views ‘and counting’ — ‘the biggest video on social media — EVER’!
By the next day views reached 248 million.
No one knows the number of views this video will ultimately earn. Views for this video beat out Oprah’s interview with Michael Jackson.
Today Fox debate ratings – which are static – came in at 12.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings. When Trump was on the Fox debate stage in 2020, the event garnered 24 million viewers, a decline of 50% since Trump first appeared on a debate stage.
Fox News Failures: Signal Not Noise
Cutting the cable cord is real. Cutting the Fox News channel out of one’s media diet just got more real. Fox News and other cable news channels are tanking thanks to the emergence of streaming digital media with events like the Trump-Tucker interview overtaking.
Trump is still the biggest ratings juggernaut in politics today. This has been true since the day still he came down the golden escalator in 2015. When Fox covered his rallies in 2015 they saw their ratings skyrocket. Murdoch decided the network would no longer air Trump rallies after he lost the 2020 election. (They only carried his live events sporadically from 2016 to 2020.) Today Fox is paying the price of its decision.
The Trump campaign had this to say:
“Fox News is in crisis mode after revealing embarrassing ratings from their GOP debate coverage on Wednesday night. The anemic ratings clearly show that viewers couldn’t have cared less to tune in to the undercard debate, instead joining the ranks of hundreds of millions in watching President Trump’s blockbuster interview with Tucker Carlson.”
The Grand Old Party Just Got Older
Trump’s America First movement is a party within a party. It became patently obvious Wednesday night that judging by the barbs lodged at their opponent, the 45th President of the United States, and in some cases former boss, that they represent the rear-guard of the now Old Grand Ol’ Party.
The demise of the Republican party, like Fox News, may be imminent if one is looking at say just the two events from Wednesday night.
The political atmosphere is so highly charged with the complexities of the all-out legal assault against our civil liberties from leftist prosecutors who have managed to indict Donald Trump in four separate legal jurisdictions — that no one can predict the fate of the former president.
He might be found in contempt of court for posting on social media tomorrow according to the Fani Willis Fulton County, GA court order. He was declared a flight risk by her and had to pay $200,000 bail. This is taking place in the no-bail era for heinous crimes ushered in by Democrat DAs across the country. Some predict one of these prosecutors will throw him in jail. That is their explicit aim of this political witch hunt.
Bannon on War Room notes the gravity of this moment in our nation’s history, poignantly stating:
This is only the third time in our history that the destiny and fate of an individual has been tied directly to the fate of the nation. General Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and now Donald Trump. The fate of Trump is tied to the fate of the nation now. His destiny is the nation’s destiny, if you think it through. Like Lincoln and like Washington, they capture massive historic forces. This is why we’re so focused on making sure you’re up to speed with what is happening geopolitically and financially throughout the world. It is more important for this populist-nationalist audience in the United States to fully understand what is going on… so you can think through what the fate of this nation is, and what our destiny is.
Before this week’s debate, many voters in the Trump movement and likely Trump himself held out some hope that the RNC would — when the time comes — support Trump as the nominee of the party. With the comportment of the six candidates running against Trump that we just witnessed, there is no doubt that the RNC only represents a gaggle of whores — its rich donors, party elites, entrenched standard issue Republicans, quislings and what Charlie Kirk refers to as the ‘Vichy French.’
Where does RNC head Ronna Romney McDaniel think Trump’s 75 million voters from 2020 will go? How do she and other party leaders think they can win an election against a corrupt Democrat machine come 2024 without Trump’s voters? The only way to defeat Trump is to remove him from the ballot.
Here is the latest snapshot of a post-debate poll published on August 24th. Go to Rich Baris, The People’s Pundit, for more poll data. Baris has issued a comprehensive episode, “Inside the Trump of Bust Vote.”
If the GOP does not stand up for Trump as the inevitable nominee, it will be the death knell for the GOP.
Fox News Banned Trump Surrogates in the Spin Room
Don, Jr. called his father’s decision to not participate in this debate, ‘correct given the set-up’ which Team Trump all but knew beforehand but the point was driven home after the debate when Fox News banned him and the entire Trump team from meeting with the press in the spin room. The plan was, in the absence of Trump’s presence, to act as media surrogates.
Chris Christie and others tried to characterize the Trump no-show as cowardly. Don, Jr’s, reply to reporters, “Trump’s afraid to debate? Yeah, that’s like saying Chris Christie is afraid of cheeseburgers.”
It takes two to tango.
Donald Trump, Jr. derided Fox News for its actions and spoke forcefully on behalf of his father, Donald Trump after the debate.
Full article from The Daily Mail here:
Video of Don, Jr’s remarks pulled from the article here:
Kimberly Guilfoyle (Don Jr’s partner) said Fox’s poor treatment of the ‘front-runner’ in the race does not bode well for Trump agreeing to appear at the next debate or any RNC debate in the future.
Is the Fox-RNC-Rich Donor triumvirate really this obviously craven?
TRUMP WAS AS FUNNY AS HE WAS SERIOUS
It’s almost anti-climatic to cover the content of the now record-breaking interview between Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump. The interview was pre-recorded and it was taped at Bedminster (see blog article, “Summer in the Garden State is Almost Over” here), two facts not highlighted in the hype but it might explain why some of the questions did not feel like ‘debate’ questions. Tucker asked — seemingly out of the blue — if Trump thought Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. Trump adroitly demurred and tried to deflect from the question.
But earlier in the 46-minute interview, Carlson asked Trump if he is concerned “the left”, after impeaching and then indicting him, would try to kill him.
“They’re savage animals. They are people that are sick, really sick,” Trump responded. “You have great people that are Democrats. Most of the people in our country are fantastic. And I’m representing everybody … But I’ve seen what they do.”
This trailer provides you with the flavor of the interview:
By now most avid Trump watchers are well aware that Trump can knock your socks off with his laugh out loud one liners or ‘character sketches’ as did here when Tucker asked him about Kamala ‘Word Salad’ Harris:
“She speaks in rhyme. It’s weird… Well, the way she talks: ‘The bus will go here and then the bus will go there! Because that’s what busses do!’”
The next day headlines carried his funny dig at Joe Biden when he said, “They always show him at the beach. Do his people think he looks good at the beach? He has such skinny legs.”
At one point Trump said, “You’re waiting for him to collapse and he almost always does.”
Why is it so darned funny?
Maybe because Trump always says the quiet part out loud. No one in the MSM dares criticize Joe Biden’s glaring infirmities. Comedians — almost all of the left — would be canceled if they did Joe Biden send-ups. Our favorite president goes there. He talks about Biden’s skinny legs, he points out the confusion, he says ‘he can’t put two sentences together.’ All true.
It’s samizdat. We laugh while we can.
Of course the conversation covered a lot of ground — Trump never misses an opportunity to remind viewers of his achievements. He always mentions the threat China poses – Did you know? China is in Cuba now, the bad economy under Biden — people can’t afford anything, plus his usual rants about how ineffective EVs and wind energy are.
If there was a theme to the interview, it came from three lines of questioning Tucker pursued regarding Jeffrey Epstein (talking about suicide or an assassination); the potential for civil war with Trump’s statement that two sides are very polarized and it ‘could be dangerous’; and, his saying point-blank – do you think they will kill you? Both men were relaxed and even keeled throughout their time together. Trump appeared especially sanguine given the fact that the next day he was submitting himself to the Fulton County sheriff’s office the next day for fingerprinting and a mug shot.
Fulton County is the only jurisdiction where Trump is being indicted that took a mug shot. The others resisted the impulse. Trump’s mug shot is being called, the Mug Shot Heard Around the World and tee shirts are flying off the shelves at Donald Trump’s campaign website. Link here. Story next week.
And how is this for counter-programming? Every candidate on the debate stage — except the lone female, Nikki Haley — wore red ties, Trump’s signature campaign attire. In the Tucker interview, Trump sported a bright blue tie.
