With Trump’s Acquittal Inevitable, Impeachment Ratings Take Drastic Drop

For months on end, we’ve known how this circus was going to end.  There is no surprise coming.  No big reveal.  This is not an M. Knight Shyamalan where President Trump has actually be removed from office this whole time.

Nope.  We know with near certainty that the Senate will acquit Trump on the articles before them, and, if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has his way it won’t take very long either.

Perhaps that is why Americans are simply tuning out of the entire fracas.

On Tuesday, the roughly 12-hour battle between President Donald Trump’s legal team and House Democrat impeachment managers attracted an audience on 11 million, down from 13.8 million from when the lower chamber took up the issue. The figures were garnered from 4.5 hours of coverage from six cable networks: ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel, NBC, and MSNBC. The ratings did not include those who watched the marathon hearing being lived streamed on social media.

Trump is accused of leveraging US military aid to Ukraine in an effort to prompt that nation to announce an investigation into the business dealings of the Biden family.  The White House has insisted that Trump’s aim was only to insure that newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was the reformer and anti-corruption leader that he promised to be during his campaign, with such an assurance being part and parcel to the release of the aid in the first place, as determined by Congress.

The only thing that could possibly bring viewers back to the table would be the addition of trial witnesses, which is something that Mitch McConnell has long believed to be an unnecessary and inappropriate possibility.