Fox News, the campaign team of former President Donald Trump, and supporters of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson all claimed victory Wednesday night in the battle for ratings supremacy between viewers of the Republican debate and Tucker Carlson’s interview of Trump. The reality is both camps were embellishing their claims, and neither did as well with viewers as each group claimed it did. Comparatively, this week’s Republican debate was kind of a ratings flop.

For example, consider a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, by Republican debate co-host Martha MacCallum. “BREAKING: Fox News Republican Debate Scores Whopping 12.8 Million Viewers — Even Without Trump,” McCallum posted. However, 12.8 million viewers should hardly be considered “whopping,” especially compared to previous debates and other shows. Such a categorization is probably closer to “fake news,” as the former president would say, than actual news.

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In 2015, the first Republican presidential debate, essentially the debut of then-candidate Donald Trump on the political stage, drew 24 million viewers, almost twice as many viewers as this week’s debate. For the first Democratic presidential debate in 2015, 15 million viewers watched. Additionally, more than 15 million people also watched the first Democratic presidential debate in 2019. All were significantly higher than the debate Martha MacCallum said had a “whopping” total of viewers.

The ratings for Trump’s interview with Carlson were even harder to evaluate. Claims of the number of viewers who watched the interview were anywhere from 87 million to over 250 million.

“231,000,000 Views, and still counting,” Trump said on Thursday. “The Biggest Video on Social Media, EVER, more than double the Super Bowl!” Another site claimed it was the most watched interview in history, even exceeding the famous Oprah Winfrey interview with singer Michael Jackson in 1993. Ironically, there was little, to any, “truth” to this.

These claims are absurd. If one added the total number of viewers combined from each debate mentioned above, it still doesn’t equal 87 million people, let alone over 250 million. Moreover, the population of the United States is slightly over 330 million people. There is absolutely no way 75% of the country took out their phones at 9 p.m. and watched an interview on X. Carlson could have interviewed the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, and 75% of people still wouldn’t tune in.

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Furthermore, given that the interview was exclusively on X, it makes those claims even less likely. And that’s even before the fuzzy math used to arrive at the 87-250 million total. “Views” on X are tallied by how many people viewed the post. Moreover, as Mediaite pointed out, anyone who may have seen the post while scrolling through the social media platform and watched for as little as two seconds is counted as a view. If someone passed a particular post multiple times, it was tallied more than once, Mediaite reported.

In reality, it seemed both the debate and the interview didn’t draw the ratings each group anticipated. More importantly, both groups should stop being dishonest with the public and acting like the debate or interview was some ratings bonanza. In reality, both were duds.