The one thing Donald Trump REALLY cares about

HINT: It's the ratings, stupid

(Donald Trump. Also,CNN.)

When Donald Trump ran into CNN boss Chris Licht backstage before last week’s town hall, the former president only had one thing on his mind.

He told Licht that the event would rate well for CNN, according to an account in the Guardian.

And when he was asked about the town hall in an interview with The Messenger which published Monday, all he could talk about was — you guessed it — ratings!

Said Trump of CNN:

“I was amazed to see that they were traumatized by what took place. They were actually traumatized. I think that instead of acting the way they did, they should have said, ‘we had a tremendous ratings night, one of the best in years, many years,’ and spiked the football, right?”

Later, for emphasis, he added: “I'm surprised they don't really say that they had a very big ratings night. Truly surprising to me.”

Those two moments typify a very important thing to know about Trump: He is uniquely obsessed with TV ratings — and uses them as a gauge for success.

It’s important to remember that Trump is, at core, a reality TV guru. He has spent decades of his life poring over ratings — and touting them.

As Vanity Fair reported on Trump’s initiation into the ratings game:

Before The Apprentice premiered in 2004, Trump was completely ignorant about how TV ratings worked, early Apprentice publicity manager Jim Dowd told PBS’s Frontline in September. (Dowd died shortly after the interview.) But as he worked on the show, Dowd said Trump “quickly became obsessed.”

“He knew nothing about Nielsen ratings,” Dowd said. “Within a week, he started to really study up. When he studies up on something that involves numbers and entertainment, then he’s going to really kind of let that sink in. And we’d have calls every single day after [a show aired], he’d usually start calling at eight in the morning, but the ratings don’t come in until 10. I’d always have to tell him, ‘Mr. Trump, we have to wait until 10. As soon as they come in, I will call you.’ ”

He’s never really looked back. He spent the 2016 campaign touting how big the ratings were for “The Apprentice” (they were big the first year and declined steadily after that). He talked about how big the ratings were for the debates he appeared in — and how small they were for the debate he skipped.

On his inauguration day, Trump was talking about — you guessed it! — ratings.

“Wow, television ratings just out: 31 million people watched the Inauguration, 11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!,” he tweeted on January 22, 2017.

And in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump was talking up the ratings that his daily briefings on the virus received. Tweeted Trump:

Because the “Ratings” of my News Conferences etc. are so high, ‘Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers” according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. “Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.” said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!

His obsession with ratings then is well documented. But, so too is the fact that Trump does rate.

There is — and always has been — a spectating-a-car-crash aspect to Trump. You can’t take your eyes off of him. He’s utterly watchable because he is so incredibly unpredictable. It is impossible to guess what he might do next.

Witness the CNN town hall.

In a piece headlined “TV Ratings: CNN Gets Big Boost With Trump Town Hall,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote:

The TV audience for the town hall was CNN’s largest in primetime since at least July 21, 2022, when it drew 3.18 million viewers for the final televised hearing of the Jan. 6 committee. It was about four times larger than the usual tune-in for Anderson Cooper 360 in the 8 p.m. hour. The 3.31 million viewers on Wednesday is the second largest audience for any single-candidate town hall on CNN since 2016; an April 2020 sit-down with Joe Biden drew 3.47 million viewers.

Yes, it was a temporary boost for CNN. (As former CNNer Brian Stelter noted, the channel’s audience averaged 538,000 in primetime the night after the Trump town hall.)

But, it was a boost! And a boost that any of the other networks would have taken in a heartbeat. Which is why the reporting after the event that Trump a) believed the CNN town hall had been a major success and b) that he was in conversation with other networks to do similar events should surprise absolutely no one.

To that first point: Trump views anything that people watched as a win for him. He is very much in the all-press-is-good-press camp. Eyeballs on him = winning.

I’m regularly reminded of Trump’s infamous quote to Playboy magazine in the early 1990s: “The show is Trump and it’s sold-out performances everywhere.”

The question for the media going forward is how to balance the fact that Trump does tend to boost ratings with the fact that so much of what he says is factually untrue. Ratings matter — of course! — but they also come with a cost when you have someone like Trump spewing misinformation.

Trump doesn’t see that cost, however. For him, it’s all about how many people tune in — not what viewing audience thinks of him or what impact the lies he tells have on those folks.

Ratings are all that matters to Trump. How he gets them (and what impact his words have on the country) are not a concern.

Which is concerning.