Civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton, a supporter of Kamala Harris, has speculated that Donald Trump “probably feels humiliated” by Harris’s better ratings at the Democratic National Convention.

“I think he (Trump) is not finding a way to deal with this prosecutor (Harris) in many ways,” Sharpton said Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It’s probably humiliating to him that the ratings for the convention were much better than those for his convention.”

“And he’s one of those people who pays a lot of attention to ratings,” he said. “Her speech at the Republican National Convention got much better ratings than his.”

Newsweek The Trump team asked for comment via email.

More than 20 million people watched the Democratic National Convention on all four nights, surpassing the total number of viewers seen at the Republican National Convention in July.

According to ratings company Nielsen, about 26.2 million viewers watched the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, the final day of the convention, with the highest number of viewers being 28.9 million when Harris officially accepted her party’s presidential nomination.

That surpassed the final night of the RNC, which drew 25.4 million viewers and peaked at 28.4 million during Trump’s keynote speech. It also exceeded the final night of the 2020 DNC, when Biden accepted the Democratic nomination with 24.6 million viewers.

Trump, a former reality TV star, has mentioned “ratings” in 546 posts on his X (formerly Twitter) and Truth Social accounts since 2010, regularly using “low ratings” as an insult and “highest ratings” as praise.

In his book On call: The path of a doctor in public service, Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said that at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Trump was fixated on the ratings of his daily press conferences.

“After a meeting in March, the president asked me to come into his satellite office next to the Oval Office, a room with several television screens on the wall, all tuned to different news channels,” Fauci wrote. “He called Fox News host Sean Hannity. ‘Hey Sean,’ he said on speakerphone. ‘You should see our ratings!'”

“After another packed press conference in the White House Press Room, he left the podium with me and other members of the task force, and as we entered the anteroom, he looked at the television screen and exclaimed, ‘Our ratings are incredible! We have to keep it up. We have better ratings than cable, better ratings than the networks!'”

Trump mentioned ratings in connection with last week’s Democratic National Convention only once, in a post last Wednesday on Truth Social. The post included a link to a Breitbart News article claiming the convention had lower ratings than the 2016 convention.

Neither the Brietbart article nor Trump mention that the 2024 Republican National Convention had worse ratings than the DNC.