Donald Trump generally cares about one question: Who won? Or, at a minimum, is there a way to make it look like Donald Trump won?
In the case of Trump v. Fox News debate, the picture is mixed—which means Trump will doubtless spin it out into a personal win. (Okay, he was going to do that no matter what.) The ratings of Trump’s own veterans benefit counter-programming will not help, since “two of the cable channels that showed parts of Trump's event, CNN and MSNBC, had about a quarter of Fox's audience combined.” While Trump’s event also live streamed all over the place, “according to Google, ‘debate live stream’ beat out searches for ‘Trump live stream’ by 170% on Thursday night.”
BUT the debate “was the second lowest rated debate of the season. So Trump is certain to take credit for hurting the channel's total viewership.” Only the Fox Business debate two weeks ago was rated lower—and a lot of people just plain don’t get Fox Business in their cable packages. Maybe there’s some natural drop-off in ratings as people have seen plenty of debates already, but Trump is certainly not going to be bothered by a little notion like that.
One big thing we can expect to hear about from Trump?
Twitter said 36% of #GOPDebate candidate mentions were about Trump, way ahead of Ted Cruz's 16% and Marco Rubio's 13%.
At a minimum, it looks like the people who predicted—once again—Trump’s political doom from skipping the debate were wrong. And we’re in for another round of braggadocio from Trump. But what else is new there?