By Storm Gifford
New York Daily News
Jul 18, 2020 9:26 PM
Rachel Maddow’s July 16 interview of Mary Trump drew more than 5 million viewers. (Steven Senne/AP)
Rachel Maddow’s margin of victory was bigly.
The talk show host crushed the competition — both cable and network — on Thursday thanks to her riveting interview with President Trump’s niece, Mary Trump.
That “Rachel Maddow Show” episode reeled in a whopping 5.23 million viewers — the most ever for a single episode in the show’s 12-year history, reported The Hollywood Reporter.
Maddow’s one-on-one with Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, was also the most-watched program Thursday evening and easily breezed by its previous high of 4.47 million spectators for her January sit-down with Rudy Giuliani crony Lev Parnas.
The episode also set the viewership record for any scheduled show in MSNBC history, according to the Reporter.
After Mary Trump’s an interview with The Washington Post in which she stated, “Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear (my family) use the N-word or use anti-Semitic expressions,” Maddow pursued a similar line of questioning by asking if Trump had ever heard her uncle utter similar epithets.
The niece confirmed that she had indeed heard Donald Trump employ prejudiced language.
“I don’t think that should surprise anybody given how virulently racist he is today,” replied Mary Trump.
The president groused about his niece Friday on Twitter.
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“Mary Trump, a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!) and me, and violated her [nondisclosure agreement],” tweeted Donald Trump.
During her Maddow interview, Mary Trump also boldly asserted that the president simply is incapable of conquering the inherently challenging responsibilities of the job.
“I want people to understand what a failure of leadership this is,” explained Mary Trump. “And the reason he’s failing at it is because he’s incapable of succeeding at it.”
Her book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” is a runaway hit, selling an extraordinary 950,000 copies on its first day, according to The Guardian.
The 240-page tome offers countless examples cited by Mary Trump in describing her family’s role in formulating what she calls Donald Trump’s narcissism and inability to empathize.
Thursday’s edition of “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell,” which followed Maddow’s show, drew its largest audience in months with more than 3.5 million viewers, according to the Reporter.
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