Trump-Tucker Interview Reaches New Interview Record—Yes, Really

Guest post by Catherine Salgado 

The impressions and views gained across multiple platforms for Tucker Carlson’s interview of Donald Trump beat out the previous record for most-viewed interview.

As of publication, Tucker’s tweet of the full interview has “260M views” on Twitter. The interview was also streamed by other people and on multiple platforms, and clips of the interview have circulated on social media and news. As of last year, the interview with the highest viewership ever was Oprah Winfrey’s 1993 interview of Michael Jackson, which had a global audience of 90 million. The numbers put Tucker’s interview of Trump as the new winner, with 260 million+ views from Twitter/X,  Rumble, Gettr, independent media platforms, and more.

Critics have noted that “views” on Twitter are how many times a tweet has been seen, and for a tweet with video include impressions of people who spend two seconds looking at something as they scroll through their feed. A user can also view a tweet multiple different times and thus bring up the number of impressions. This is all true, and no doubt some of the 260 million views Tucker’s tweet got (as of 4 pm Eastern on August 26) include such impressions. It is deceptive, however, to take this as absolute proof that Trump’s interview did not gain hundreds of millions of views, for multiple reasons.

First of all, there is no way to prove that a significant or majority percentage of Trump’s views were simply people scrolling past it (or that most of the views were the same people going back five or twelve times). That is an assumption that many people are making, but they cannot prove it. It is possible that the 260 million+ views include many people who simply scrolled past it, and it is equally possible that the views include many more people who watched it for two or 10 or 40 minutes. That is very important to keep in mind.

Not only that, but I know multiple people who do not have Twitter accounts who yet went to Twitter via the Internet to watch the interview. I also know someone who started to watch the interview on one platform and switched to another platform, meaning that the person might’ve been watching on Twitter for only a section of the interview, but ended up watching the entire interview. Once you take such instances into account, it becomes clear that it is impossible to be certain of how many people watched the interview and for how long—but it’s a very large number.

What we do know is that Tucker’s tweet alone garnered almost 260 million impressions. Hundreds of thousands—possibly millions—more viewed the interview in full or in clips on Twitter and different platforms. The contention that Trump got nowhere near 260 million views is therefore an opinion or interpretation of the data, but it is not proven fact. And the opposite opinion is equally valid. In fact, it is undeniable that the interview got 260 million views, making it the most-viewed interview ever.

I’ll give just a few examples of viewership on other platforms to illustrate how viewership was much bigger than RINOs and leftists want you to believe. Steve Bannon’s War Room alone got 328,000 views for their livestream of the interview (as of Saturday afternoon). Then a show clip from War Room the next day posted on Rumble that included part of the interview got 33,100 views. Bannon’s show, by the way, isn’t just posted on Rumble—it’s streamed on Gettr and Real America’s Voice, and it’s on Apple Podcasts. The War Room Gettr livestream got 58,600 views. So just from one show across multiple platforms the interview got hundreds of thousands of extra views on top of the millions that Tucker got on Twitter. One America News (OAN) Network also live-streamed Tucker’s interview of Trump, as did Real America’s Voice. Anti-Trumpers don’t seem to want to acknowledge any of those views.

Then there’s all the people who posted clips of the interview on Twitter, Gettr, TruthSocial, Facebook, etc. Clips of it were included in TV news reports. There were even clips included on Substack. It’s therefore safe to say the Tucker-Trump interview has and will continue to beat out the previous record-holder for most viewed interview.

Furthermore, TV views also include people who tune in, they are not representative only of people who watched the entire broadcast or almost the entire broadcast. Nobody questions it when Fox says the GOP debate, for instance, was viewed by 12.8 million people across TV and streaming, and yet it is guaranteed that not all those people watched the entire debate (and The Gateway Pundit previously explained why Fox’s debate viewership is not as impressive as Fox would like you to think, either). This is simply to point out that both social media and TV view numbers include people who only watch videos for brief spaces of time. It is, therefore, normal—and has been for a long time—to announce viewership that includes people only briefly tuning in.

It is also noteworthy that interviews posted on social media can continue to get views long after they were posted, which is different from a live TV interview. Social media has certainly changed media, especially since social media became far more popular as a news source than cable television for Americans ages 49 and under. That was probably in Trump’s mind when he made his brilliant move to skip debating opponents who are far, far behind him in the polls and do an interview with Tucker Carlson on Twitter/X instead.

Oh, and by the way, not all those views are from the U.S. So if you note that the Twitter views are inching closer to the U.S. population (which is about 335 million), that doesn’t automatically make them invalid. It means some are multiple views from the same person and some are foreign users.

It’s a new world with a new media landscape, and Tucker and Trump seem to be very good at using new media to their advantage.

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