as much as he s turned this into something of a show of entertainment, of circus he s also energized people to thinking about the political process which isn t all bad. i think he s changed the electricity in the water, if you will. david, in baltimore, i wonder if this is built in structural advantage for the republicans and a disadvantage for the democrats. i don t see any way it s going to get 23 million viewers unless cnn persuades donald trump to show up. i don t disagree that trump has made a huge difference but if you look at his ratings for the apprentice, he started with 20 million. by 2004 he was down for 4 million. those are huge audience losses. when he says look 23, 24 million it s because of me. no. you ve got a show and you re not doing it. you re doing 4 million and 7
from a television or entertainment perspective, maybe it went too long. what was your take? i really did think it was long. when it moved past 11:00, i was like will this thing ever hand. in fairness, 11 candidate brought fiorina in. that s a big, big number to deal with. the debate did try to deal with substance. i kind of agree with part of what david said. i thought with the two shots and the questions where you ask someone about something they said about you that cnn was pushing the conflict angle which makes for good prime time television but maybe too much. when i went back and thought about it, i have to say this, not everybody was diminished. carly fiorina definitely was not diminished by what happened in that debate. i did feel that donald trump was diminished. i thought he looked smaller in tv terms than i had ever seen him. part of that might have been that there was a very intense
he met pope john paul ii back in 1979 at catholic university of america. here s how williams described meeting the pope in an nbc blog post in 2005. he wrote i chatted up a secret service agent who told me the pope would be coming our way but he gave a different version to esquire magazine that same year. he said i met pope john paul ii on his visit to the campus simply by positioning myself at the top of the stairs of the shrine of the immaculate conception. i just figured that s where he would be stopping. there was no mention about the secret service agent. that s obviously a small detail, but it hits at a very big question of his credibility. those pope stories were covered quite a bit back in february. now that williams is coming back, let me bring back david z uc gentlemen, all three of us will be tuning in and be curious how viewers react. david, you didn t think he should be returned at all to nbc
is it all trump and what does it mean for the candidates at the networks? david, david, welcome to all of you. thank for being here. is it all trump? are these ratings entirely thanks to donald trump? you ve had for eight years or almost eight years democratic in the white house. they re looking for this our opportunity to reclaim the white house. i absolutely think this is donald trump. you look at the monster numbers at the debate and look at the undercard. you have candidates that are scoring within the margin of error on that stage for the lesser debate. that s a huge audience as well. this is a significant amount of the electorate. i think it hyper charges us.
or msnbc. what do you expect the audience s reaction will be? i don t know. i ve seen stuff on social media already mocking him in this last week about the return with the pope. people saying high thought he was the pope or the secretary of the pope making fun of his exaggerati exaggeration. i don t know, with millennials i think that s going to continue to be a problem and it s the nature of social media that i think he s going to continue to get beat up in that realm. brian, you know i do not believe he should be coming back. i think he violated the fundamental sin of this business, which is to tell the truth. he did not tell the truth. he lied on multiple occasions. they do say, though, these were minor league offenses, not major league offenses. to give the other side, what i ve heard from nbc executives is we think we have one of the biggest stars in television. now we get him on msnbc, a channel that s been struggling in the ratings. david, my prediction here is that a lot of