As Republicans sifted through the wreckage of a historic midterm wipeout this week, Newsmax's Greg Kelly sat down for his primetime program on Wednesday and declared who was to blame.
“I agree with President [Donald] Trump, conservative media, especially Fox News, bears a hell of a lot of responsibility for what went down,” he said. Kelly pointed the finger at some of Fox's biggest stars, ridiculing Jesse Watters for cracking jokes as the results rolled in Tuesday night and pointing to Bret Baier's reported $25 million home sale as proof that the network's talent was too rich to care. Fox News, Kelly concluded, had become “lazy, and way too casual, and way too reliant on the crap that CNN says.”
The MAGA-on-MAGA violence suggests Newsmax is still trying to prove it is the one true Trump network. Faced with the election’s disastrous outcome for Republicans, Newsmax’s instinct was to circle the wagons around Trump and take aim at his chosen scapegoat. But previously unreported viewership numbers show that the pro-Trump outlet has far bigger problems than Fox, and that its own viewers are also in revolt as Trump’s approval craters.
Days before the midterms, Status reported that Fox News was on track for a brutal year-over-year ratings decline at precisely the moment cable news networks typically enjoy an election-season viewership surge. It was an ominous sign for Republicans. The audience that has turned to the MAGA Media machine for the better part of a decade appeared to be tuning out in protest of Trump's actions that have alienated his base and much of the country.
But Fox wasn’t the only network suffering ratings losses.
Nielsen data obtained by Status shows that Newsmax, the smaller pro-Trump cable channel that has long positioned itself as the president's most loyal outlet, saw its total-day audience fall 26% in October compared with last year. And the picture grows bleaker still when you look at the viewers advertisers care about most. Last month, as interest in the midterms ran high and rival networks were posting gains, Newsmax's audience in the coveted 25-to-54 age demographic plunged 33% from a year earlier, falling to just 6,000 viewers.
That's a national audience the size of a crowd that would fit comfortably inside a minor-league ballpark, with plenty of seats to spare.
The ratings slide has sent Newsmax tumbling down the cable rankings. According to the Nielsen charts, the network sat in 28th place in October, trailing channels such as Hallmark Mystery, Oxygen, and Freeform. That’s not exactly the kind of company a channel that markets itself as a conservative powerhouse would want to keep. A Newsmax spokesperson did not respond to a Status request for comment.
The numbers raise an uncomfortable question for the Chris Ruddy-owned network, and one its executives have surely been dreading: what exactly is Newsmax if Trump is turning off audiences?
For years, Newsmax marketed the channel on the premise that Fox wasn't pro-Trump enough. When the Murdoch outlet called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020, Newsmax opened its arms to the viewers who stormed off in protest, and it rode that grievance to the most successful stretch in its history. It boosted Trump relentlessly on air, amplified his baseless claims about a stolen election, and portrayed itself as an extension of his movement. That strategy ultimately cost it more than $100 million in defamation settlements with voting-machine companies like Smartmatic and Dominion, but it delivered an audience.
The approach worked when the MAGA base was energized and hungry for a network that would tell it what it wanted to hear. But it is far less sustainable when that base is disillusioned and in open revolt, with influential figures like Tucker Carlson publicly reversing on Trump and calling for his removal.
Which leaves Newsmax with a genuine conundrum. It can double down on Trump and hope the slump proves temporary, betting that viewers will come back once Democrats take office. Or it can try to reinvent itself as something different, possibly a conservative news channel that isn't defined entirely by allegiance to one man. But that path carries its own danger. The viewers who remain are, almost certainly, the most devoted Trump loyalists, and any hint that the network is turning the page on MAGA could send them looking elsewhere, perhaps to the online influencers who have been slowly siphoning off right-wing TV audiences.
But as MAGA adherents move on from Trump, Newsmax is discovering it may have backed itself into a corner. For years, it made the case that it was the definitive network for Trump’s most ardent supporters. Now it faces a difficult question: what happens when those viewers stop tuning in?
