Former President Donald Trump is falsely claiming that his interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week was "the most watched" interview and video in "history."
In a video shared to Truth Social on Wednesday, the former president claimed that the interview had dethroned the "longtime reigning champ," Oprah Winfrey's televised 1993 interview with Michael Jackson—which Nielsen ratings showed had more than 62 million viewers, according to The New York Times.
Trump touted the view count of Carlson's post containing the interview video last week on X, formerly Twitter. As of Wednesday, the post had over 262 million views.
However, the metric only measures the number of people who may have seen Carlson's post—including those who may have just scrolled by the post—not the number who might have actually viewed the video.
"Wow, my interview with Tucker Carlson has turned out to be the single most watched video and interview in the history of the world, I guess," Trump says in Wednesday's video. "Such a great honor to have participated. 262 million views and counting."
"More than doubling the longtime reigning champ, the Oprah Winfrey interview of Michael Jackson," he continues. "So, I want to congratulate Tucker, and I want to thank everyone. Thank you very much."
Newsweek has viewed Carlson's posts in multiple versions of the Twitter app that were released before platform owner Elon Musk removed public video view counts and changed Twitter's name to X earlier this year.
Trump's interview with Carlson has only 21.7 million video views as of Wednesday in all of the older versions of the app. That figure is nowhere near the "most watched" interview of all time. It is also a far cry from the most watched video, as the "Baby Shark Dance" video on YouTube currently has over 13.2 billion views.
In addition, according to X, the video view metric is "triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds" and sees as little as 50 percent of the video viewer on their screen—making it unclear how many of the 21.7 million may have even watched any substantial portion of the interview.
Some versions of the app released after Musk added the post view count leave little room for doubt about the fact that the post count metric does not reflect video views, as they show the current post views of 262 million alongside the video view number of 21.7 million.
When asked about Trump's claim and given a screen capture of the video view count, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung suggested to Newsweek that "using an out-of-date app" was not "an accurate way of measuring views."
Cheung claimed that "the updated version of X" would provide "a more accurate understanding of the hundreds of millions of views the video received. X does not claim that the post view count reflects video views.
Newsweek reached out to X for comment via email on Wednesday.
Trump's interview with Carlson was posted to X at nearly the same time that the first GOP presidential primary debate, which the former president skipped, was airing on Fox News.
While the interview did achieve a significant number of views and may have succeeded in drawing attention from the debate, it is not even Carlson's most watched video on X.
The first video that the conservative pundit shared as part of his "Tucker on Twitter" series, now "Tucker on X," had been viewed at least 26.9 million times as of Wednesday.
The post containing the video also had 121 million views, indicating that a significantly larger percentage of those who saw the post of Carlson alone watched the video than they did when he interviewed Trump.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Aila Slisco is a Newsweek night reporter based in New York. Her focus is on reporting national politics, where she ... Read more
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