Former president Trump returns as a diminished TV draw

New York: Former President Donald Trump reached less than a million measurable television viewers over the weekend in his return to the public stage at a North Carolina political event.

Newsmax averaged just under 700,000 viewers between 8 pm and 9:30 pm Saturday when Trump spoke, the Nielsen company said. His speech was also carried live on One America News Network and C-SPAN, but their audience is not measured by Nielsen.

Fox News Channel did not carry the speech by the former president beloved by many of its viewers. The network averaged more than 1.5 million viewers for its typical Saturday night fare of Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro.

Although Trump couldn’t eclipse Fox’s regular lineup, at least for Newsmax, showing the former president live appeared to be a good business decision for the network. So far this year, Newsmax has averaged 202,000 viewers in prime time, including the more heavily trafficked weeknights, Nielsen said.

Later on Saturday, Fox’s debut hour with conservative media personality Dan Bongino reached 1.8 million people, making it the most-watched cable news show of the weekend.

The broadcast networks made a swift turn into summer, with NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” topping the ratings upon its return. CBS led for the week, averaging 3.3 million viewers in prime time. ABC had 3.17 million, NBC had 3.16 million, Fox had 1.7 million, Univision had 1.5 million, Ion Television had 970,000 and Telemundo had 880,000.

TNT led the cable news networks, averaging 2.36 million viewers in prime time last week. Fox News Channel had 1.94 million, HGTV had 1.25 million, MSNBC had 1.23 million and TBS had 938,000.

ABC’s “World News Tonight” led the evening news ratings race, averaging 7.3 million viewers. NBC’s “Nightly News” had 6.3 million, and the “CBS Evening News” had 4.7 million.