Donald Trump's 'Miss USA' Pageant Earns Record-Low Ratings

Trump's 'Miss USA' Pageant Is A Ratings Bomb -- And That's Good

Donald Trump’s "Miss USA" pageant has set a record -- but, uh, not a very good one.

The show, which networks Univision and NBC recently dropped after the Republican presidential candidate decided to stake out a position about Mexican immigrants being rapists, garnered its lowest ratings ever after airing on the little-known Reelz channel on Sunday.

A mere 925,000 people tuned in to the pageant, according to the ratings agency Nielsen. For Reelz, which reaches less than 60 percent of TV-watching homes, that's actually a pretty good number. But it’s a far cry from the roughly 5.5 million viewers who tuned in to the pageant on NBC last year. It's even a major step down from 2013, when the show’s viewership reached a then-record low of 4.6 million people.

Trump, who is currently kicking up dust on the Republican primary field, has sued Univision for $500 million for dropping the show.

The larger question here, as The Onion recently pointed out, is why, nearly a century after women won the right to vote, we still have these pageants where they're paraded around like farm animals at an auction -- and why any network would be willing to air them.

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