Since Nielsen started measuring TV ratings in 1950, there has not been a U.S. president as obsessed with them as Donald Trump. He boasts about his own ratings, uses them to bash his rivals and even makes suggestions about how various networks and shows could improve their own ratings.
At times in the past, Trump seemed to have a handle on the ratings, doing well in the first seasons of “The Apprentice” and scoring with events such as the Republican National Convention. But lately, he seems to have lost his touch.
That was evident this week in viewership data for this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, a holiday programming staple since it began in 1978. The Kennedy Center recognition, for a performer’s contribution to American arts and culture, has featured some of the country’s most beloved and celebrated performers, including Tom Hanks, Lucille Ball and Aretha Franklin.
For years, the program was hosted by the legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite, but other high-profile hosts have included David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, Queen Latifah and Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the president the center is named for.
This year, however, Trump is on a mission to recast the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in his own image. The members of his loyalist-stacked board of trustees appointed him chairman, and he moved this month to affix his name to the building. He also moved himself out of the presidential box and took center stage, hosting the event that was broadcast Tuesday. When the honorees were announced in August, Trump claimed to have been “98% involved” in choosing “anti-woke” honorees — including actor Sylvester Stallone, the rock band KISS and disco singer Gloria Gaynor.
The results? The show drew its smallest audience ever, averaging an estimated 2.65 million viewers, a 35% decline from 4.1 million viewers in 2024, according to preliminary Nielsen data shared by Programming Insider. It may have been a mercy that CBS’ legal and standards department insisted the network call the show by its traditional name, the Kennedy Center Honors, instead of the “Trump Kennedy Center Honors,” as the White House styled it.
Trump’s programming ideas appear to have been the worst presidential advice on a nonpresidential matter since Richard Nixon supposedly advised the Washington football coach to try a double-reverse trick play in the 1971 NFC playoff that resulted in a 13-yard loss and possibly cost the team the game. For one thing, Trump completely misread the audience. This is a show that has traditionally honored creative artists as varied as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, minimalist composer Philip Glass and actor Morgan Freeman. The range is in keeping with John and Jackie Kennedy’s mix of highbrow and middlebrow tastes. Trump turned this vision of “Camelot” into something closer to “Spamalot.” Look, I’m no snob. I recently rewatched “Rocky” with my son, and I sing along when I hear “Rock and Roll All Nite” and “I Will Survive.” But that’s not the audience for this show, which celebrates a wide range of artistic and cultural contributions. It might have worked if Trump had paired the Italian Stallion with, say, jazz giant Wynton Marsalis. Such an unconventional combination would have been a savvy programming move, signaling to a new audience that it should watch without losing the core viewers who reliably tune in. But Trump’s flaw as the nation’s programmer-in-chief is the same one he’s shown as president: He simply can’t understand people who don’t think like him. He’s good at reading the pulse of his conservative base, which he understands, but he never appears to figure out what might motivate the rest of the country. And like the ratings for his recent show, his standing in the polls keep dropping as a result.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
