This story’s been live at the Daily Beast since early this morning and there’s still no Trump statement gloating about it as I write this at 5 p.m. ET.

I’m disappointed, frankly. The man is schadenfreude personified. What better use of his time is there nowadays than sh*tposting about his enemies’ failures? The golf course will still be there tomorrow.

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote that Shep’s move to CNBC made sense of a sort. He was an awkward fit for a network that specializes in financial news and Jim Cramer yelling about stuff, but evenings at CNBC were a black hole. Once the market closed for the day and Cramer went home, they were relegated to running reruns of “Shark Tank” and “Jay Leno’s Garage.” Literally anything would have been an improvement, which gave Shep leverage. He could build his own show from the ground up with management’s blessing and neither side would have anything to lose.

Well, CNBC management could lose some money. But not nearly the sort of money Shep was getting at Fox.

A year later the experiment looks to be a qualified failure. The qualification is that he is outdrawing last year’s “Shark Tank” reruns in his time slot — congrats — but ratings have never taken off. He’s not even in the top five most-watched programs at CNBC or the top 10(!) in the key 25-54 age demo, which is surprising in one sense given his high profile but less surprising in another. Conservative Fox News viewers weren’t going to follow him over to CNBC after his Trump criticism at FNC and viewers eager for liberal-flavored news coverage at that hour have Erin Burnett at CNN or, if they prefer something stronger, Joy Reid at MSNBC. The hope was that he’d hold onto Cramer’s audience and eventually build on it, but as one former cable exec told the Beast, Shep’s hard-news program isn’t an obvious draw for people fond of Cramer’s manic market analysis. “[V]iewers almost never tune into a specific show at a specific time anymore — they go to particular networks for a certain kind of experience,” he said. The CNBC “experience” was financial news; bringing Shep in was supposed to broaden that experience.

Hasn’t happened (much). And reportedly some of his colleagues resent it.

Smith entertained discussions with a number of competitors including CBS News, but ultimately signed with CNBC in 2020 on a deal rumored to be in the $5-6 million ballpark—a significant pay cut from the roughly $30-million salary he was believed to be raking in at Fox News. Smith’s salary and the resources Hoffman has thrown at his show have created a tremendous amount of resentment from other CNBC talent, according to multiple insiders familiar with the situation.…

According to Nielsen Media Research, the show averaged just 197,000 total viewers in June, losing a third of its viewers since the show’s peak in February, which saw an average of 296,000 nightly viewers. The show is currently the seventh-highest rated program on CNBC and 11th in the key demographic of viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 years old…

At least two people with direct knowledge of the situation described Smith as having regular “temper tantrums.” When CNBC announced Smith was joining the business news channel, it tapped Sandy Cannold, a veteran TV producer, to help helm the show along with co-executive producer Sally Ramirez, a veteran of local television. But according to multiple people familiar with the matter, Cannold departed less than six months in, and clashed at times with Smith in front of staff.

CNBC built him not one but two new studios, notes the Beast, first at their HQ and then again at his home to accommodate social distancing during the pandemic. They also reportedly considered moving Cramer to a new time slot since he’s an awkward lead in to Smith, which would have been a major shake-up at a network where Cramer has been at 6 p.m. for ages. Allegedly they’re now thinking of “expanding the primetime news hours around Smith” although it’s not clear what that would mean. Two hours for Shep instead of one? Another news hour at 8 hosted by someone else? Who?

Does anyone want to watch a straightforward news show anymore in which the anchor doesn’t have a clear political agenda? Maybe that’s Shep’s problem — he needs to get back to jabbing at Republicans, as that gave him whatever edge he had while at Fox. But it’s unclear if the CNBC audience would find that interesting rather than alienating.

CNBC is going to catch a break from its usual “all Shark Tank, all the time” primetime line-up a few weeks from now when it gets to cover the Olympics as part of NBC’s team. Co-anchoring the network’s coverage will be … Shepard Smith, a prime opportunity for him to get face time with viewers who wouldn’t otherwise be watching after dark. Maybe he can make some of them stick around after the Games end. If not then there’s always the Megyn Kelly path back to a mainstream audience: Be run out of TV, start a podcast, take a broadly partisan line aimed at ingratiating you to one ideological camp or the other, and then parlay that into a talk show on radio. Here she is a few days ago complaining that the media made the insurrection on January 6 out to be much worse than it actually was. She keeps talking like that and she’ll be back on Fox in no time.