Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's response to Donald Trump's primetime address on Tuesday evening drew a slightly bigger audience than the president's remarks.
According to Nielsen, the preliminary numbers showed the 15 minutes between 9 and 9:15 p.m. EST, when the president spoke, drew a combined 28.1 household rating in metered markets across ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, Fox News and FOX, while the next 15 minutes, which included Pelosi and Schumer's response, attracted 29.3—a figure 4 percent higher.
Of all the broadcast networks airing the address and rebuttal, CBS pulled in the largest audience, with 8.04 million viewers tuning in for the segment. NBC followed closely behind with 7 million, while ABC attracted 4.43 million and FOX drew 2.56 million.
According to Deadline, early figures showed that Pelosi and Schumer's response from the Capitol building also beat Trump's address from the Oval Office by 26 percent on CNN and 15 percent on MSNBC. Both events received the same number of viewers on Fox News.
The partial government shutdown, which entered its 19th day on Wednesday with no resolution in sight, went into effect last month after Trump refused to sign a stop-gap bill to keep the government operating through the New Year because it didn't include provisions to fund his proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border—one of the president's key campaign promises.
Last night, Trump went on national television to plead his case for $5 billion in funding to build the wall, before Pelosi and Schumer delivered their rebuttal. During his speech, Trump called the security issue at the border "a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul" without offering a new policy or potential solution.
Pelosi and Schumer strongly rebuked the president's version of the facts, calling his narrative "full of misinformation and even malice." "Sadly, much of what we have heard from President Trump throughout this senseless shutdown has been full of misinformation and even malice," Pelosi said, using a teleprompter. "The president has chosen fear. We want to start with the facts."
"The president is rejecting these bipartisan bills, which would reopen government over his obsession with forcing American taxpayers to waste billions of dollars on an expensive and ineffective wall, a wall he always promised Mexico would pay for," she added.
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