CNN down bigly from 2017 ‘Trump bump’ through 2025

CNN has benefited from the president’s “Trump shock.” Donald Trump management the first, but ratings dropped dramatically the second time around as the media and network landscape changed radically.

The analysis shows that CNN lost more than 40% of its total daily and prime-time audience from 2017 to 2025, the first consecutive years of Trump’s two presidencies.

In 2015, CNN averaged 711,000 viewers in prime time, and a total daily audience of just 489,000 viewers. That year, Trump did not take the escalator down to announce his presidential candidacy until mid-June, and the mainstream press did not take him seriously for most of the year.

By early 2016, when it became clear that Trump had a legitimate shot at becoming the Republican Party’s nominee, CNN and other media outlets began to realize that the “Apprentice” star was a huge ratings draw.

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CNN lost 45% of its prime-time audience and 44% of its total viewers during President Donald Trump’s first year in office in 2017 through 2025. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

CNN has been known to broadcast empty stages at Trump events in anticipation of his speaking in order to keep viewers hooked. He has broadcast his rallies live, and has sometimes been criticized from the left for giving too much attention to the GOP nominee. The result was a huge ratings bump with CNN averaging 1.3 million viewers in prime time and a total audience of 752,000 viewers in 2016.

CNN’s rise in 2017 continued during the first year of Trump’s presidency, as the network embraced “resistance” programming and then-White House correspondent Jim Acosta emerged as a household name, often feuding with Trump and members of the administration.

CNN averaged 1 million viewers in prime time, and the network managed a total daily audience of 775,000 viewers despite being regularly derided as “fake news” by the president himself.

During that period, the term “Trump bump” surfaced in the cable news industry and CNN. CNN end of the year press release It has been described as a “ratings milestone” and Axios reported That Trump had a “ratings boom.”

Fast forward to 2025, and CNN looks noticeably different. Longtime Primetime hosts Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo are gone, Acosta is no longer at the network, and CNN has seen a variety of leadership changes.

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Former CNN president Jeff Zucker oversaw the network during Trump’s first administration. (J. Countess/Getty Images)

It was CNN’s then-president, Jeff Zucker, who oversaw the shift from a fact-only news network to anti-Trump opinion programming. Had to go out Before the long-planned merger that put the network in the hands of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Zucker’s first successor, Chris Licht, tried unsuccessfully to eliminate partisanship, and was replaced by Mark Thompson in 2023. CNN is up for sale again, with only Anderson Cooper remaining from the 2017 primetime lineup.

The results were not pretty, and CNN’s current leadership was unable to capitalize on a second Trump presidency.

In 2025, CNN’s prime-time viewership dropped to 573,000, and its total daily audience was just 432,000. From 2017 through 2025, CNN saw 45% of its prime-time audience flee, and lost 44% of its total daytime viewers.

CNN insiders insist the ratings debacle is a result of audiences consuming news on other platforms nowadays. Streaming audiences have grown significantly across the industry, and a never-ending catalog of political podcasts is available.

The share of American households without cable grows every year, and nearly 80 million homes have cut cords, while about 54 million still pay for service, according to a report. Evoca. But the problems facing CNN don’t just result from cord-cutting, as it happens Fox News Channel It grew 10% during peak times and 13% among day totals during the same time period. Along the way, Fox News’ share of the cable news audience rose from 47% in 2017 to 63% in 2025.

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CNN’s Jim Acosta was famously hostile to President Donald Trump’s first administration. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Fox News contributor Joe Concha said CNN’s viewership hemorrhage suggests the network has seen a decline in viewers because it has lost credibility with Americans.

“This shows that the networks that cried wolf, or in this case Trump, have gone a thousand times further than many of their viewers can tolerate,” Concha told Fox News Digital.

Concha criticized CNN for providing what he called biased coverage on a variety of topics since 2017, including pushing the Russian collusion narrative while rejecting it. Hunter Biden’s laptop.

CNN 2025 also hit all-time lows among the advertiser-coveted demographic of adults ages 25-54 in 2025, averaging just 102,000 demo viewers during primetime and 70,000 throughout the day.

Curtis Hook, managing editor of NewsBusters, said the media landscape has evolved, and Trump’s critics no longer need to rely on cable news.

“CNN and the artist formerly known as MSNBC were the favorite gathering places for the resistance in Trump’s first term,” Hook told Fox News Digital.

“Now, they’re part of a panel from hell with podcasts like the evil witches in ‘You’ve Got It’, the conservative Bulwark crowd, and MeidasTouch… the wine mothers of the resistance have plenty of options to consume their Trump hate and talking points,” Hawke continued.

President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference in 2020, during his first term. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

DePauw University professor and media analyst Jeffrey McCall feels that the sharp decline in CNN’s audience was likely due to a combination of factors.

“One key is that the establishment media and center-left voters were in deep denial when Trump first won the presidency in 2017,” McCaul told Fox News Digital. “They couldn’t believe that Hillary actually lost, which led to Russia collusion conspiracy theories and related reports, and then ultimately to Trump’s impeachment. There was great hope at the time of Trump’s ‘resistance,’ and these dedicated viewers couldn’t get enough of that coverage.”

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“Resistance has by no means evaporated,” McCaul said, but “there is less sense on the left that all-out resistance is necessary or can even succeed,” given that Trump has regressed politically and cannot run for a third term.

McCaul said: “Even the ‘Hair on Fire’ speech that Trump would not leave the White House after his current term, and that he would maneuver for a third term, did not receive any attention.”