A Thursday night interview with former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal alleging an affair with President Trump could not lift CNN out of last place in the ratings.

Imagine you are CNN chief Jeff Zucker, and you have spent weeks and weeks turning your basement-rated, anti-Trump network into a sensationalist soft porn channel — and when the payoff finally arrives in the form of the McDougal interview, your network still lands in … last place.

Just like he did with his “poop cruise” and missing Malaysian airline flight 370 obsessions, Zucker put all of his chips in the middle of the table with the porn stuff, went all-in with a salacious narrative in the hopes that when the payoff arrived, with it would come a ratings bonanza.

Unfortunately for Zucker and his on-air minions, CNN’s credibility is in such a sinkhole, the payoff did not lift CNN out of the basement, nor did it make much news.

While the McDougal interview did nearly double CNN’s average nightly rating, which barely squeaks over a million viewers, to 1.95 million average primetime viewers, CNN still got walloped by its competition at Fox News and MSNBC, who grabbed 2.6 and 2.4 million viewers, respectively.

Even the CNN show that aired the interview, Anderson Cooper’s 360, lost to the competition. While Cooper’s 8 p.m. hour grabbed 2.2 million viewers, Tucker Carlson’s 8 p.m. hour at Fox News earned 2.7 million.

Cooper’s 9 p.m. hour grabbed 2.3 million viewers, but he still lost to Rachel Maddow at MSNBC and Sean Hannity at Fox, who both earned 2.9 million viewers.

The only good news for CNN is that Cooper won the night’s most viewers in the 25-54 age demo, but that is all inside baseball stuff related to advertising rates.

The bragging rights in cable news are all about total viewers.

The most dispiriting news for the far-left CNN must be Trump’s job approval ratings, which have steadily climbed throughout CNN’s onslaught of porn. The latest Fox News poll, has Trump sitting at a healthy 45 percent approval rating, and the Real Clear Politics poll of polls shows an upward trend from 39.8 percent approval to 42.1 percent. Trump’s disapproval numbers have also fallen two points. That is a +4, overall.

CNN  has spent 25 years protecting the Clintons from everything from perjury involving sexual liaisons with an intern in the Oval Office to allegations of rape. Watching this same network pretend to freak out over allegations of a 12-year-old consensual affair has only turned this fake news factory into a bigger laughingstock than it already was.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.