CNN benefited from the “Trump bump” during President Donald Trump’s first administration, but ratings are down bigly the second time around as both the media landscape and the network have changed drastically.
An analysis shows CNN has lost more than 40% of its total day and primetime audience from 2017 to 2025, the respective first years of the two Trump presidencies.
In 2015, CNN averaged 711,000 primetime viewers with a total daily audience of only 489,000. That year, Trump didn’t descend the escalator to announce his presidential run until mid-June, and he wasn’t taken particularly seriously by the mainstream press for much of the year.
By early 2016, as it became clear that Trump had a legitimate chance at becoming the Republican Party’s nominee, CNN and other media outlets started to realize that the “Apprentice” star was a significant ratings draw.
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CNN famously aired empty podiums at Trump events in anticipation of him speaking in order to keep viewers hooked. It carried his rallies live, sometimes taking heat from the left for giving so much attention to the GOP nominee. The result was a massive ratings bump that saw CNN average 1.3 million primetime viewers and a total day audience of 752,000 in 2016.
CNN’s spike continued in 2017 during the first year of Trump’s presidency, as the network embraced “resistance” programming and then-White House correspondent Jim Acosta emerged as a household name, often feuding with Trump and members of the administration.
CNN’s primetime lineup averaged 1 million viewers, and the network managed a total daily audience of 775,000 despite being regularly being mocked as “fake news” by the president himself.
During that time, the term “Trump bump” emerged in the cable news industry and CNN. CNN’s end-of-year press release touted “a ratings milestone,” and Axios reported that Trump delivered a “ratings boom.”
Fast-forward to 2025 and CNN looks remarkably different. Primetime hosts Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo are long gone, Acosta is no longer with the network, and CNN has seen a variety of leadership changes.
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Then-CNN President Jeff Zucker, who oversaw the pivot from a just-the-facts news network to anti-Trump opinion programming, was forced out ahead of a long-planned merger that put the network in the hands of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Zucker’s first successor, Chris Licht, attempted to tamp down the partisanship to no avail, and was replaced by Mark Thompson in 2023. CNN is for sale, again, and only Anderson Cooper remains from the 2017 primetime lineup.
The results have not been pretty, and CNN’s current leadership has been unable to capitalize on the second Trump presidency.
In 2025, CNN’s primetime viewership plummeted to 573,000 and its total day audience was only 432,000. From 2017 through 2025, CNN saw 45% of its primetime audience flee and lost 44% of total day viewers.
CNN insiders insist the ratings debacle is a result of audiences consuming news on other platforms nowadays. Streaming audiences have grown significantly across the industry, and a never-ending catalogue of political podcasts is available.
The share of U.S. households without cable increases each year, and roughly 80 million homes have cut the cord, while roughly 54 million homes still pay for the service, according to Evoca. But the issues for CNN aren’t caused by cord-cutting alone, as Fox News Channel grew 10% during primetime and 13% among total day during the same time period. Along the way, Fox News’ share of the cable news audience grew from 47% in 2017 to 63% in 2025.
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Fox News contributor Joe Concha said CNN hemorrhaging viewers indicates the network has seen viewers tune out as it lost credibility with Americans.
“This shows that the networks that have cried wolf, or in this case, cried Trump, have gone to that well about one thousand times more than even many of their viewers can stand,” Concha told Fox News Digital.
Concha criticized CNN for giving what he called slanted coverage of a variety of topics since 2017, including pushing the Russian collusion narrative while dismissing Hunter Biden’s laptop.
CNN’s 2025 also hit all-time lows among the advertiser-coveted demographic of adults aged 25–54 in 2025, averaging only 102,000 demo viewers during primetime and 70,000 throughout the day.
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck said the media landscape has evolved, and Trump’s critics no longer need to rely on cable news.
“CNN and the artist formerly known as MSNBC were the go-to gathering places for The Resistance in the first Trump term,” Houck told Fox News Digital.
“Now, they’re part of a tableau from hell with podcasts like the wicked witches of ‘I’ve Had It,’ The Bulwark crowd conserving conservatism, MeidasTouch… resistance wine moms have a lot of options to consume their Trump hate and talking points,” Houck continued.
DePauw University professor and media analyst Jeffrey McCall feels the drastic decline in CNN’s audience was likely caused by a combination of factors.
“One key is that the establishment media and left-of-center voters were in deep denial when Trump first won the presidency in 2017. They couldn’t believe Hillary had actually lost, which led to the Russia collusion conspiracy theories and related reporting, and then eventually to impeachment. There was great hope at that time for the Trump ‘resistance,’ and those niche viewers couldn’t get enough of that coverage,” McCall told Fox News Digital.
McCall said that “the resistance has not evaporated by any means,” but “there is less sense on the left that all-out resistance is needed or can even work,” given that Trump bounced back politically, and he can’t run for a third term.
“Even the ‘hair on fire’ rhetoric that Trump won’t leave the White House after this current term, and will maneuver into a third term, is getting no traction,” McCall said.
