It turns out that when Donald Trump insults someone, it can be good for ratings after all. During the presidential campaign, when then-candidate Trump laid into a competitor like Marco Rubio or Hillary Clinton, their stock went down. After a series of "mean tweets" directed at Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, the MSNBC anchor's show has seen its ratings spike. After the now-infamous "bloody facelift" tweets, more people than ever tuned in to watch Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough address the issue. According to Nielsen, the audience was about 1.66 million viewers.
The Ratings Story
The second-highest Morning Joe rating of the past cycle came the day after the 2016 election that saw Trump defeat Clinton in what was for many in the major media a stunning surprise. The current audience spike is a brief shining moment for a program that tends to run second to Fox & Friends. This time at least, Joe and Mika beat their rivals on Fox. They did it by nearly doubling their typical average viewership of about 896,000.
The multiplier — roughly 1.85x the program's baseline audience — is the number worth paying attention to. It is not a Morning Joe number. It is a mechanic. When a sitting president attacks a specific program by name on Twitter, the program's audience nearly doubles for the subsequent broadcast.
Why It Happens
Three dynamics are producing the ratings spike, and all three are worth studying by any adversarial program facing a comparable attack cycle.
Cross-audience tune-in. When a presidential attack lands on an adversarial program, audiences from both sides of the political spectrum tune in. The president's aligned audience tunes in to see the program respond. The president's opposed audience tunes in to see the program's response and the substantive argument against the attack. Total tune-in exceeds the program's normal audience by a multiplier that depends on the attack's intensity.
News-cycle dependency. The adversarial program becomes a temporary node in the news cycle the president is running. Audiences that follow the news cycle from any direction route through the adversarial program because the program has become part of the news cycle's content. The dependency is temporary — the program will likely return to baseline audience once the news cycle moves on — but the spike during the cycle is real.
Engagement-as-substitution. Audiences that would have consumed mainstream press analysis of the attack substituted to the adversarial program because the program was the news. The substitution captures audience that would have routed to other coverage. It does not produce sustained audience capture — the substituted audience is unlikely to become regular Morning Joe viewers — but it does produce the spike.
Is the Spike Sustainable?
The spike is almost certainly a flash in the pan. Both of the highest-rated Morning Joe shows have to do directly with Trump, and most Trump fans prefer Fox & Friends to anything on MSNBC. It is entirely possible the current uptick is only because a lot of Trump fans tuned in to see the fallout created or the outrage expressed by the TV duo. There may be others who watched because they support what they believe Morning Joe represents — a somewhat politically centrist program on a left-leaning network.
While the morning shows mix daily news, events, and social commentary, each has a definite lean — a spin — and the spin is an intentional marketing choice. Both the Fox and MSNBC morning programs set the table for a particular audience and tend to draw that audience on a regular basis. When a show gets nearly double its baseline, more digging is needed. It is one thing to assume why more people are watching. It is something else entirely to have actionable information to work from.
The Broader Pattern
The Morning Joe spike is one data point in a broader ratings pattern that has been visible across cable news since the beginning of the Trump presidency. CNN's ratings in the primary cycle roughly doubled from prior baselines. MSNBC's evening lineup is posting the strongest ratings the network has seen in a decade. Fox News is holding audience despite the shift in political weather. Cable news as a category is benefiting operationally from the current political cycle in ways that would have been hard to predict even eighteen months ago.
The mechanic is the same across the category. Attention drives audience. The president is generating attention at rates no cable news programming department can manufacture. The programming departments are benefiting from the attention regardless of whether the specific coverage is adversarial or supportive.
What This Tells Program Development Teams
Three operational takeaways for the network programming and development teams currently building strategy for the fall.
Cross-audience moments are forecastable. Programs operating in adversarial relationships with the president can forecast when cross-audience tune-in moments are likely to occur. The forecast variable is attack intensity. Programs that prepare content explicitly for the forecasted spike will capture more of the audience opportunity than programs that respond reactively. The Morning Joe segment that produced the 1.66 million number benefited from that kind of preparation.
Substitution audience is reachable but not retainable. The audience that substitutes during attack cycles can be reached, but the audience is unlikely to convert to regular viewership at substantial rates. The conventional television-development assumption that ratings spikes produce sustained audience growth does not apply to attack-cycle spikes. Programs building long-term programming strategy on attack-spike audience numbers will misread the underlying audience structure.
The dependency runs both ways. Programs that benefit from attack-cycle audience become operationally dependent on the attacker for the audience capture. That dependency is a strategic risk the program may not want to internalize. If the president tires of the specific program, or if the news cycle moves to different subjects, the audience benefit ends. Programs that build too much of their forward strategy on the assumption of continued attacks are exposed.
What to Watch Next
Three questions worth watching over the next several months.
Whether Morning Joe holds any of the substitution audience. The interesting number is not the 1.66 million spike. It is the audience three, six, and twelve weeks out. If the program holds meaningful audience gains from this specific spike, the substitution mechanic converts more strongly than expected. If the program reverts fully to 896,000, the substitution audience is confirmed as unreachable at scale.
Whether the president continues the specific attack cycle. The Morning Joe attacks have been sustained over multiple weeks. Whether that specific cycle continues or moves to different targets will define whether the ratings pattern is program-specific or more broadly applicable.
Whether other networks explicitly plan for cross-audience moments. Programming and development teams at CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the broadcast networks are watching this dynamic closely. Whether the industry explicitly begins to program for cross-audience attack cycles will define the shape of cable news development for the balance of the presidency.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
