GOVERNMENT/MEDIA/POLLS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump doesn’t care how the shutdown is playing in the polls. He routinely dismisses unfavorable poll numbers as ‘fake news.’ Likewise, he is unlikely to be convinced he’s in political danger because of negative news coverage of the shutdown’s consequences. On Sunday [1-6-19], he blithely asserted that ‘many of those people that won’t be receiving a paycheck … agree 100 percent with what I’m doing.’ But there’s one metric Trump does care about: television ratings. And the early numbers don’t look good, especially with Trump’s base. If the shutdown was successfully galvanizing his supporters, you would expect fiery exhortations from Fox News anchors to attract the eyeballs of Trump’s base. But on the first Wednesday and Thursday of the new year, all of Fox News’ prime-time shows scored viewership below their daily averages for 2018. Fox News’ tentpole show, Hannity, which averaged 3.3 million daily viewers in 2018, hasn’t reached 3 million since December 12th, a week before the shutdown began.”
–Bill Scher, “Trump’s Best Shutdown Move Is to Fold Now,” Politico, January 7, 2019